:Kalliope Lane

I finally made the fabulous Fauxstess Cupcakes from Vegan with a Vengeance! Since I love reading the kitchen chronicles of others, I took lots of pictures so I could write this up in proper fashion.

It seems I need to always cook my cupcakes a little longer than Isa’s recipes say (the oven thermometer I have says my oven’s 350 is 350, but apparently they’re both off). My first batch was sticky and a little underdone. I used rice milk, and the batter had been very thin.

So I made a second batch the next day, which worked out well since the frosting recipes make enough for at least two batches. My second batch had great texture. I used half soy milk, half rice milk, and this time it even frothed up when I mixed it with the mixer. I added an extra heaping tablespoon of flour, and this time the batter was much more how I thought it should be (and more like the batter on the PPK episode I saw).

Here they are unfrosted, both dark & shiny from the flash,

and slightly out of focus without:

Ah, the frosting. Frosting and I don’t get along.

The first night, I used Earth Balance sticks, Spectrum shortening, and sugar that I THOUGHT was superfine/caster, but it wasn’t. It remained a soupy, melty, gritty glob that wouldn’t get fluffy. I made another batch and fixed the sugar problem, but I still got no fluff, no aeration, no nothing. By then it was late and I thought the heat may have been affecting the outcome, so I called it a night.

The next day I made the second batch of cupcakes and tried the frosting again. This time I gave up on the Spectrum shortening and used Crisco instead, with EB sticks and superfine sugar. I finally got fluffy frosting, but the grit of the sugar never went away. It still tasted good. Just gritty. Next time I’m going to try it with powdered sugar instead.

Filling the cupcakes was super easy. I got a cheap decorating starter kit from Jo-Ann’s and had fun piping in the fluff. I used the microwave technique for the ganache, and it worked just fine.

Here they are, just having been dipped:

After setting in the fridge:

I had a hard time finding the right consistentcy for the decorative frosting, but they turned out quite pretty:

See how pretty they are? Well, it’s too bad they didn’t stay that way.

After a day or two, the curliecues seemed to get absorbed into the ganache frosting, and all that was left were ghosts of the little curlies. Weird.

Maybe it was my chocolate, which was rather soft. Maybe I needed a stiffer white frosting. Who knows. I’ll experiment next time…

The final verdict was that they were DELICIOUS, and really not that hard to make. Much easier than all of the steps imply. My parents were over for dinner and really enjoyed them and got a kick out of the name. My mom, not knowing what they were called, initially said, “they’re like the cupcakes you used to take in your lunches.”

We determined they tasted best and had the best texture when at room temperature, so we’d take them out of the fridge 10-15 minutes before we wanted to eat them.

I actually made these at the beginning of June, and just took this long to get the post up. I’ve since made the Coconut Heaven cupcakes too, which were a huge hit (although I had some frosting issues with those, also).

Isa is a genius! Buy the book! Make the cupcakes!

It’s hot and humid here, and it makes me lethargic and irritable. Unfortunately, we have lots of shopping and cleaning to do, and yet more unpacking.

Food sidenote: We used some Smartlife Taco “ground beef” and an Ortega soft taco kit to recreate the Taco Nights that my family had when I was growing up. Diced tomatoes, shredded lettuce, taco sauce, salsa, and even some Tofutti Sour Supreme. The results were incredibly close to the real thing, and it was a fun silly dinner night.

Do I ever have interesting posts here about anything other than food these days? Probably not. I don’t mind though, because I have great fun to report:

Crazy Asian Tofu Dessert
Oh. My. God. My boyfriend and my friend Stephanie think I’m a little weird for being so head-over-heels in love with this stuff, but I really CANNOT get enough of it. It makes me school-girl giddy. I even talked to my cats about how great it is.

Every Saturday, one of our local Asian markets makes homemade soft-set tofu, which they sell warm and water-packed in quart containers. You also get a side of ginger honey syrup (honey is a non-vegan thing I do have occasionally). People apparently wait in line for it! You dish some of this watery tofu out into a dish and pour a little sweet syrup over it, mix it about, and eat. It reminds me of a soft custard, which I always used to love. And the best part is that it’s only $1.85!

What is this stuff really called? Is it a traditional Chinese dish? Or did this tea house/market just invent the best thing ever?

Side Note:
This market is better than the other I frequent by leaps and bounds! It’s cleaner and bigger, and has lots of great tofu products. PLUS, it doesn’t smell overwhelmingly of fish. Only downside: it was jam-packed and had long lines.

Just Like Honey Rice Nectar
This is a honey-flavored syrup available online at places like Pangea and VeganEssentials. And it tastes just like honey.

Ricemallow Fluff
Made by the same company as the honey-clone above (and available in the same places), it’s just like the Marshmallow Fluff stuff in the jar. I plan to have my first Fluffer Nutter sandwich soon — they apparently passed me by in childhood.

Pigeon Peas
Thanks to Ines, I sought these out at a local grocery with a great Goya section. I’ve learned that Pigeon Peas, aka gandules, are also the what the Indians call “toor dal” when skinned and split. Except that the Indian varieties seem to be yellow instead of green…and they also sometimes call them red gram dal. Yes, confusing.

Regardless, they’re very good! Fabulous made with rice. They could be my new favorite bean. Downside: I’ve only seen them in this one particular store, which is known for its great selection of latin foods.

Xocolatl
Whoa! This stuff is spicy! It’s dark chocolate infused with chilis, cacao nibs, maca, vanilla, and nutmeg. I think I remembered them all. It would be hard to eat a lot of it, but it’s interesting and is a fun change of pace. It’s made by Dagoba Chocolates, and is available at VeganEssentials if you can’t find it in your local HFS.

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I think I’ve hit everthing I wanted to mention. Tonight we’re having our favorite pesto & tomato sauce pasta dish.

Tidbits: (have I mentioned this before?)we make the pesto with cashews instead of pine nuts, because they’re cheaper and because they make it kind of creamy.

We also use this incredible product from Bionaturae. They’re strained plum tomatoes in a 24oz. bottle — you can make a great simple tomato sauce in a very few minutes. Great flavor!

We’ll also be having a bottle of Kenwood Zinfandel, which is now my second favorite zinfandel after Gundlach-Bundschu’s Morse Valley 2001 Zinfandel, which we discovered on our vacation to Sonoma.

Okay. Enough about food. I’m going to go write!

I’ve been a fitness infomercial junkie lately. I recently bought the Core Secrets package with the stability ball, and Billy Blanks’ Bootcamp (Billy of the Tae Bo fame). I’ve gotta tell you, the Bootcamp is kicking my ass, and I’ve only been doing the Basic Training video. I think it will definitely be effective if I keep it up.

It really makes me want to take Tae Kwon Do! I love the kicking! I could pretend I’m Buffy or Sydney from Alias. I might have to seek out some classes…

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I bought the best chocolate bar today: Terra Nostra’s Dark Truffle bar
Yum! The inside isn’t what I’d call “truffle-like”, but it’s still rich chocolatey goodness.

I also made a kickass vegan “egg salad” today to use in my lunches this week at Jury Duty. I started with the Happy Hen salad from Vegan Vittles, and added some paprika and scallions, and more tumeric & relish than it called for. I thought the tofu salad I’d bought from Nature’s Bin was tasty, but this really takes the cake. Or the egg salad. Whatever.

I went on an exotic fruit spree the other night. I got myself a Fuyu Persimmon, some Kumquats, and…a Durian.

The persimmon wasn’t impressive. It was blandly sweet with a faintly mangoesque texture. I threw most of it away after sharing with my office assistant.

The kumquats were the real find! I’d tried them a few years back and thought they were yicky little things, but wanted to give them another shot. After managing to peel the sucker, I bit in and again thought it was a blechy, bitter little sad-excuse-for-an-orangelike-fruit.

So I went online to research my persimmon (which I wasn’t sure was a persimmon at the time). I discovered that you must eat the peel of the kumquat! That’s where the sweetness is, wouldn’t you know. And I have to say, yes, it makes all the difference! My only complaint is that such a small fruit shouldn’t have such sizable seeds.

And on to the Durian.
It’s my fault, really it is. Why was I intrigued by the disgusting descriptions that I found online? I can’t really say. I was hoping, I suppose, that those few who described the wonderfully creamy, custard-like insides would be right.
Durian really is the stinky fruit. It smelled just like the stinkbombs I remember from my junior high hallways. Just like it. And it’s just as potent. I did taste the tiniest amount, and while it was somewhat creamy and sweet, it was creamy and sweet stinkbomb, and so I must say I don’t really care for it. Rotten egg breath just isn’t appealing.

I had to wrap the thing in several paper bags, then in a garbage bag, and then take it out immediately to the trashcan. I thoroughly washed the counter, cutting board, and knife. I opened windows. I sprayed air freshener. I burned incense. And still I smelled it in the kitchen!

I finally tracked it down to a smidge in the bottom of the sink. It was approximately 1/16th of a teaspoon. I wiped it up and threw away the paper towel. But then I had to wrap up the paper towel in several layers of plastic bags!

And so went my Durian adventure. Not so fun as I’d hoped.

Now on to the New Year’s menu. We made fun mushroom pate-filled potstickers as our first course. The wrappers in the regular grocery store aren’t vegan, but there are many vegan wonton and gyoza wrappers at a well-stocked Asian grocery. They were served on a bed of carmelized fennel and red onion that had been cooked in a beer reduction. We added dollops of wasabi “sour cream”. Very good!

These ended up being our main course as well because the quiche, which I mentioned in an earlier post, turned out to be a bit of a dud. First we had trouble with the pie crust. (We did not use the recipe from the quiche for the crust.) Once we got that fixed and baked it, we discovered that it didn’t have a quiche-like texture. There would be no slices cut from the thing because it was instead like a warm, gooey artichoke dip. It seemed like a lot of liquid while I was mixing it up, but being the poor chef that I am, I assumed that the liquid would magically cook off and it would transform itself into a vegan quiche. Not so. We scooped it out of the pie shell the next night and ate it as a warm artichoke dip w/ bread & crackers, and it was very tasty that way.

For dessert we had awesome brownies from The Chicago Diner Cookbook — my first truly great vegan brownies. Lots of egg replacer, but great fudgey, gooey texture. We served it with our Raspberry Vice Cream. (Note on the vice cream: we will use raw cashews next time to reduce the roasted nut flavor, but it was very rich and good.)

I read online that one of the traditional New Year’s dinners for good luck includes black-eyed peas for luck and cabbage for wealth. I was excited about this because I’d only known about pot roast, and that obviously wasn’t an option.

We made a delicious vegan version of the traditional Southern New Year’s dish, Hoppin’ John. It’s basically a rice pilaf w/ black-eyed peas. We added some chipotles for smokiness instead of ham and bacon. We added some Yves Veggie Canadian Bacon the second night to add more smoky bacony flavor. Tom liked it even better this way. I thought it was overwhelmingly smoky–my preference would have been for about 1/4 the amount, minced rather than diced, so as not to overshadow the rice and beans. We used brown rice, and cooked the black-eyed peas in the pressure cooker with a few cloves of garlic and a couple of sage leaves.

We sauteed up some cabbage sprouts as if they were collard greens, and had them on the side and mixed in with the dish. (Vegetarian Worchestershire Sauce, salt, garlic) This meal was so delicious! I want to make it all the time!

My paper has finally clicked for me, and it’s all due to my presentation. Some people may find it strange, but I wasn’t really nervous at all about giving my little 6-10 minute talk. My class was at 4pm, and starting at 3pm, I went through my outline, simplified it, and then wrote a couple phrases on an index card for each section. Can’t write the paper, but a presentation? Sure! No problem!

But anyhow — just doing this process has made it feel really possible to get the thing written. Suddenly I feel like I DO know what my paper is about. It’s all coalescing in my head, finally. Finally.

But I’m still incredibly behind.

Incidentally, we didn’t make the yummy sounding quiche last weekend because I was working on my paper instead. We were trying to save time. It might be on the agenda for this Sunday, though. I also want to make homemade seitan sometime soon.

Go see The Incredibles!! It was so clever and funny and cute. Very well done.

I’m very excited for our Sunday night dinner. It will be Deep-Dish Sundried Tomato Quiche, which appeared in Marie Oser’s Vegan Gourmet column in Vegetarian Times, April 2003. We’re going to make the veggie side-dish, too.

I made the Parmazano from Jo Stepaniak’s The Uncheese Cookbook last night. I need to try it in something else — it seems very heavy on the nutritional yeast compared to the almonds. I wonder if my yeast flakes were too powdery (which would mean I’d use more of them by measure)? In fact, I just saw a comment on Amazon about how to use 1/2 the amount in the recipe if your flakes have a powdery appearance. Damn! I’ll just have to make it again.

I had another dessert fiasco this weekend. I swear I cannot bake. We had friends over for an autumn dinner so we could have some of the wine we brought back from Sonoma. We made a yummy kalamata tapenade. We had a fantastic salad from Vegan Planet — something about Asian pears with a warm walnut dressing over baby spinach. We stuffed acorn squashed with a wild rice stuffing that had cranberries, smoked tofu, and veggies. And then there was to be dessert…

I made the Richer Than Fort Knox Cake from Sinfully Vegan. I’ve been wary of some of her recipes because she tends to include ingredients like applesauce, which are usually fat replacers. Ditto with this cake. And it came out horribly rubbery, just like a bad lowfat or fatfree recipe. Mind you, I may have slightly overmixed the batter, which could have toughened it a bit, but really…this was bad. We threw the whole thing away. The “pudding” in the middle of the cake was pretty darned good, though — it turns out more like a non-whipped chocolate mousse than a pudding, or what I like to call Chocolate Sludge. I’d use that again, but just in a very different cake recipe. Boo. Hiss.

For dinner last night we made the Linguini w/ White Bean & Sage Sauce (or whatever it’s called) from Vegan Planet. We subbed thick spaghetti for the linguini because that’s what we had. It was so easy and very very tasty!! And healthy, really. You could even use whole wheat pasta and make it more wholesome. Recommended.

Our Thanksgiving menu will be a bit of an experiment. Tom’s going to make a bread stuffing to put in roasted poblano peppers. We’re also going to have some portabellos, and my mom will veganize her candied yams. I’m going to make the Date Pecan Coffee Cake from The Voluptuous Vegan (I’ve made this before, and it’s awesome!). I’ll be sure to report on how it turn out.

So here are the places we went to in San Fransicso and Sonoma while on vacation.

Golden Era on Friday night, a vegetarian chinese/Asian place, and had a really good curry with brown rice. The eggplant dish was less spectacular — mostly salty.

On Saturday morning we went to the Market down at the Ferry Building. I bought heirloom beans from a vendor. We tasted fantastic Indian chutneys and bread, and Tom fell in love with some cheese from local cheese producers. I’d go to this place every weekend if I lived in SF — they had lots of local organic farmers there selling, and they say there are even more during the peak season.

We walked to the Fisherman’s Wharf area, which is very touristy, and went up to Fort Mason. Once we finally found the right building, we had lunch at The Greens. The place was packed, and we could see why: the view of the harbor and bay was beautiful. Some of the tables and booths were carved from massive tree trunks. We both had great lunches — mine was a marinated kebob of veggies and chewy tofu with a side of seasoned rice. I also had a great salad with pears(I think it was pears) and walnuts. The server was helpful in pointed out the vegan dishes. Contrary to what I’d heard, there were a few vegan selections on the menu, so it wasn’t as dairy laden as I’d thought it would be. We both died over the German Chocolate Torte for dessert. Delicious.

Saturday we went to Millenium. I was surprised at how busy it was. I guess it’s just hard to comprehend a vegan restaurant doing so well! The place was gorgeous; just as beautiful as any other high-end restaurant. Unfortunately, I wasn’t feeling all that well that evening, so I didn’t get to fully enjoy the experience. I had a very interesting raw butternut “ravioli” appetizer. Tom had fried oyster mushrooms, which reminded me of a calamari appetizer in its presentation. My entree was a peppercorn crusted portobello, which was good, but not outstanding. I picked it as an attempt to stay away from my usual fare (curry, coconut milk sauces, asian flavors), but I think I would have enjoyed one of the other meals much more. By the time dessert rolled around, I was feeling very horrible, but I did have a bite of it. We tried to be adventurous and got the Raisin Spice flan w/ Rum Raisin sorbet. They were both very strong in flavor, especially the rum in the sorbet! It was interesting to try, but I wouldn’t recommend it. All in all, I wish things had gone differently for the evening. Feeling better and making different menu choices would have made a huge difference.

We ate at Herbivore on Divisidero twice. I had the sausage bisquit for brunch, which had a scrumptious mushroom gravy, and also the blueberry cornbread, which was wonderfully moist and delicious. On our second trip we both got the Tempeh BLTs and enjoyed them a lot. We got the Shawarma Wraps to go to take with us on the road. We ate them cold a couple of hours later as a picnic lunch, and we thought they were great! Kind of like a vegan gyro, with extra seasonings.

In Sonoma:

Maya Restaurant: We had a nice dinner here. The tables and chairs appeared to be hand-carved. The servers were friendly, and the price very reasonable. It’s not listed on the website’s menu, but I had a nice roasted vegetable dish, and we also had the empanadas. It’s the kind of place we’d frequent if it was in Cleveland.

Sonoma-Meritage Restaurant & Oyster Bar advertised a vegan tasting menu, so we went there. Actually, it had a vegetarian tasting menu listed, and in small print, it added “vegan version available”. Unfortunately, all they did was take the cheese out of the vegetarian dishes, so I hardly felt full at the end of the meal. I had to send back one dish because they included the pesto, which contained cheese. The bread wasn’t vegan, either. I was hungry when we were done! The cold cucumber salad was tasty, though, as were the delicately fried portobello slices. I wish I’d gotten more than six of them! The atmosphere here was wonderful, however, with handblown glass lamps and other original decorations.

We had breakfast twice at the Basque Boulangerie Cafe, a cute bakery & deli right on Sonoma Plaza. It was popular with the locals and was packed every moment we were there. Tom was in love with the Sweet Onion Tart (a quiche), and I got to enjoy my morning oatmeal with soymilk, raisins, and brown sugar.

Our favorite meal by far was one that we added on at the last minute. We had lunch at La Salette, a Portuguese restaurant, the day we drove out of Sonoma. I had “The Vegetarian”, which was happily vegan without any modifications. Here’s the description: “baked vegetables with coconut rice, tomato-peanut sauce and plantains”. I’m terribly upset that I didn’t take a picture of it, because it was seriously the most beautiful dish I’ve ever gotten or made. Gorgeous variety of color, and great presentation. Over the mound of coconut rice were roasted shitake mushrooms, cauliflower, white beets, pearl onions, a few leaves of brussel sprouts, plantain slices, and whole carrots. The tomato-peanut sauce isn’t what you’d expect — definitely not overpoweringly peanutty, like a Thai sauce. Just mild, savory, red-orange goodness. Their rolls were also divine (I spent so much time checking the dairy that I neglected to ask about the eggs, so I may have goofed up there). I had a great salad with candied walnuts and a creamed mustard vinaigrette. Absolutely delicious, wonderful, flavorful, fantastic. Tom also loved his dish. I’d heartily recommend it to anyone!!!