shadowspar

Obscenely rich, completely vegan. An excellent way to get tofu into those who profess to loathe it. We had a family friend proclaiming how horrid tofu was as he was working his way through his third slice of this.

(This is a very slightly tuned-up version of a recipe in the Rebar Cookbook. Said cookbook is Full of Good and Wonderful Things, and I will not stop plugging it until everyone has a copy. =)

Crust:

• 3 tbsp sugar
• 1 cup spelt flour (or unbleached white flour)
• ⅓ cup toasted cashews (or substitute whole-wheat flour)
• ⅛ tsp salt (omittable)
• ½ tsp cinnamon
• ¼ tsp powdered ginger
• ¼ cup vegetable shortening
• 3 tbsp vegetable oil
• ½ tsp vanilla

Filling:

• 1 tsp vanilla
• ¾ cup sugar
• 2½ boxes extra-firm silken tofu
• 1lb dark chocolate
• ⅛ tsp salt (omittable)
• 2 tsp espresso powder (optional)

Crust:

Preheat oven to 350℉. Grease an 8" springform pan.

Place sugar, flour, cashews, salt, cinnamon & ginger in a food processor. Whiz until finely ground. Add shortening; process until well blended. Turn out into a bowl; add oil & vanilla. Mix well. Press the mixture into the bottom of the springform pan. Bake for 15 minutes; set aside & let cool.

Filling:

Drain the tofu; purée in a food processor until smooth. Add sugar, vanilla & salt; mix well. Melt the chocolate in a double boiler. Fold the melted chocolate into the tofu mixture & mix thoroughly.

Pour the filling over the baked crust. Bake for 35min or until firm. Cool completely on a wire rack. Refrigerate overnight before serving. Omnomnom.

Grant loaves: super-easy to make whole wheat bread with a super-dense texture (almost muffin-like, with a crisp, substantial crust). No kneading. Minimal time commitment - scratch to bread in 90 minutes.

This is a dense bread that goes well with butter, jam, or a nice cheese. Also great with soups, stews, and the like. Won't fit in a garden-variety toaster, but toasts up nicely in a toaster oven. Definitely not sandwich bread.

The original recipe appeared in a British cookbook published in the 1940s, written by Ms. Doris Grant. It's exactly the kind of bread recipe I'd be looking for if I were working shifts at the munitions factory but still expected to bake fresh bread for the family every day.

The recipe as I remember it, cut down to one loaf instead of the original batch of three:

• 1⅔ cups warm water (yeast-friendly; ~95-100℉ or ~38℃)
• 1 tsp brown sugar (the darker the better)
• 1 tsp yeast
• 4 cups whole-wheat flour
• 1 tsp salt

The temperature of all ingredients is key, so if you should happen to keep your flour in a coldroom or some such, bring it into the kitchen and let it warm up a bit.

Grease a loaf pan.

Stir the sugar into the water until dissolved, then add the yeast. Sift the flour and salt together into a bowl, or if you're like me, dump them both into a bowl and run a whisk through them a few times to mix. After about ten minutes or so, when the yeast is foamy and happy, make a well in the middle of the flour and pour the yeast & water in. Stir with a wooden spoon, working the dry outsides towards the center. Mix for about a minute. Again, if you bake like I do, you'll get annoyed with the stirring process after about 30 seconds and mix in the remaining dry bits with your hands. ^_^;

Form into a loaf and dump it into the greased loaf pan. Let rise in a warm place for ~30 minutes, until the loaf has increased in size by about a third.

While the bread is rising, preheat your oven to 400℉. Bake for 40 minutes. When done, the loaf should have a substantial crust and sound hollow when tapped on the bottom. Turn out onto a wire rack to cool.

Since having to quit eating eggs on account of my youngest daughter's egg allergy, one of the dishes we've really missed is macaroni salad. The traditional family recipe calls for Miracle Whip, all varieties of which contain some amount of egg. Most of the vegan mayo substitutes try to replicate plain mayonnaise, and even it just doesn't have the same zing. Someone on one of the veggie boards pointed out that Miracle Whip is just mayo with a few additives to make it more sweet & tart, though, and further recommended tuning up some Vegenaise with a bit of sugar and cider vinegar, a strategy we used to great effect. Mixing ¾ tbsp of white sugar and ½ tbsp cider vinegar into 1½ cups of Vegenaise gives a vegan "Miracle Whip" that has about the right balance of sweet & tart, but is a bit weaker than the real thing and still missing some of the "bite". Next go 'round we'll probably try to zip things up with a bit of lemon juice or dry mustard, but this worked passably well. Use that to make a double recipe of Company's Coming Main Macaroni Salad and you are off to the races.

Made a veganized version of these this morning and they turned out very nicely. Subbed Earth Balance out for the butter (first time baking with it; it's neat stuff, eh?) and ¾ cup soymilk + ¾ tbsp cider vinegar for the buttermilk.

Left out the dried fruit because we didn't have any on hand, but even with only ½ cup of chocolate chips, they were still quite busy. I can see these being repeated for a nice breakfast treat at home or work; they're relatively quick to make, and much less sickly than store-bought doughnuts or pastries.

Joy of Baking: Chocolate Chip Scones

We're vegetarian, I'm lactose-intolerant, and my youngest daughter is allergic to eggs, so vegan food makes with the happy for us. Birthdays get interesting, since the requisite centerpiece cake is problematic: most any bog-standard cake contains eggs, and we can't dodge the issue with an ice-cream cake either.

What we do (and we're not the first to have done this) is to take one of the basic cupcake recipes from the excellent Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and turn it into a cake.