Christmas season has officially begun!
My fiance and I were starting to set up my Christmas decorations and I decided that we needed a festive treat. I couldn't find any that I liked and had all of the ingredients for, so I made one up.
The result was a crazy fluffy cookie that was definitely a hit. They aren't overpoweringly chocolatey or minty, they are just a teensy bit chewy around the edges, and they absolutely melt in your mouth. This is definitely a recipe that will be added to my Christmas cookies folder.
To decorate them, my fiance made little paper cutouts that we placed over the cookies and dusted with powdered sugar.
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups of unbleached flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 cup of sugar
1/3 cup of applesauce
1 tablespoon molasses
1/4 almond milk (soy, rice or hemp will work too)
1/4 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
1 1/2 ounces semisweet baking chocolate
1 1/2 tablespoons Earth Balance
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon peppermint extract
1/2 cup vegan chocolate chips
How to make them:
Preheat oven to 350.
Sift together the flour, baking soda, salt, and cocoa powder into a mixing bowl.
Melt the baking chocolate in a double boiler. If you don't have a double boiler, melt the chocolate in a glass bowl on top of a saucepan with simmering water in it.
When it is all melted, remove from heat and mix in the Earth Balance.
Add the sugar, applesauce, molasses, milk and vinegar to the flour mixture. When it is mixed together, add the melted chocolate and mix well.
Mix in the extracts and the chocolate chips.
Put tablespoon sized pieces of dough on a lightly greased cookie sheet and bake for 8 minutes. Cool on a cooling rack.
In the Orlando area, there are two vegan bakeries that do wedding cakes. The first one is BabyCakesNYC. They have a small spot in Downtown Disney, and all of their cakes are also gluten free and low glycemic. I like their cakes, and so does my fiance. I was a little worried that the texture of their frosting might throw off some guests, but we looked into their wedding cakes anyways. Their designs, however, are not very attractive to us. I can definitely see how they would fit in with other weddings, but it just was not us as at all. So BabyCakes got crossed off the list.
Raphsodic Bakery on Mills is the other one. They also have gluten free cakes, but it's not all they do. They are also ridiculously accommodating with allergies.
My fiance and I have been there many times and think their wedding cakes are beautiful, but we just never saw their flavors as our thing for our wedding. We didn't want to write them off, though, because no bakery is going to understand what we want in a vegan cake better. When we set up the tasting, my fiance got to pick a bunch of different cakes, frostings, and fillings to try out. This was a nice change from everyone giving us plain chocolate cake when we didn't want chocolate cake at our wedding.
We tried a chocolate biscotti cake, a spice cake, a lemon caramel cake, an almond cake, and a marzipan cake. For frostings and fillings we tried a vanilla butter cream, a spiced vanilla butter cream, chocolate butter cream, chocolate ganache, and apple butter.
Holy crap everything was so good. The marzipan cake might have actually been the best cake I've ever had. The frostings were rich and flavorful and didn't have that chemical taste that so many others had. I was in love.
When we started talking about designs, the owner was great. Since they don't use fondant and chemical food colorings, she was very open and honest with us about what the design limitations were. Within those limitations (which are a small price to pay for something so good and good for you), we could still definitely create a cake that would look beautiful and fit with the rest of our wedding.
When she gave us the prices, I almost cried. They were the lowest prices we'd been quoted for. I called my mom afterwards and told her the cost and she didn't believe me. They are also much more flexible with payments and orders than more traditional bakeries, which is great for us.
I don't think it really needs to be stated, but this is where we are getting our cake.
Yesterday was Halloween. I've been so busy with life, that I barely even realized that it was October 31st. This really stinks because I love Halloween. I love costumes and I particularly love making fun and festive Halloween desserts. Yesterday afternoon, when I realized I wanted to do something for the holiday, I decided I was going to make a delicious pumpkin dessert and I was going to carve pumpkins with my fiance.
Unfortunately, it's actually pretty hard to find a pumpkin to carve on Halloween. Everyone already has their pumpkins and all the little patches have closed down. So we didn't get to carve pumpkins, but we did get this delicious dessert. Puff Pastry with Gingered Pumpkin and Agave. It's a little bit like a simplified napoleon, and it was very tasty.
It's a much lighter dish than a lot of fall desserts. No offense to pumpkin spice cake, but it was refreshing.
You can make the filling in advance and just store it in the fridge. That actually helps it to stiffen up a little and makes it easier to serve.
Filling:
1 can of pumpkin puree (or you can use homemade puree)
4 tablespoons of agave
1 Ener-G egg (use a flax egg or another egg sub if you don't have Ener-G)
1/4 cup of vegan cream cheese
1/8 block of firm tofu, cut into cubes
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla
a dash or two each of cloves, cinnamon and all spice
1 inch of fresh ginger root, peeled
Pastry:
1 sheet of frozen puff pastry (check ingredient, most are actually vegan!)
1 tablespoon of Earth Balance
1 teaspoon of cinnamon sugar
Topping:
Agave
Powdered Sugar (optional)
Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.
To make the filling, just throw everything in your blender and set it on high until everything is really smooth. Make sure there's no chunks of ginger and tofu in there, because that would be weird.
Throw the filling in the fridge and let it sit there until you serve the dessert.
Defrost the puff pastry and cut along the folds. Then, cut each strip into 3 even pieces. You will have one oddball square of puff pastry when this is all done, but I'm sure you'll find a good use for it. Place each of the squares on a lightly greased cookie sheet
Melt the Earth Balance and mix in the cinnamon sugar. Brush the mixture over the top of each pastry square.
Bake the pastry for 10-15 minutes, until everything is golden and puffy.
To serve, place one square of puff pastry on a plate and top with a big spoonful of the pumpkin filling. Carefully put a second square of the pastry on top, creating a little sandwich. Then add a tiny spoonful of the filling on top.
Drizzle the whole thing with agave nectar and sift some powdered sugar over all of it.
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