This weekend is Rob’s birthday, so I thought it would be a good chance for me to try out a vegan recipe. This one comes from “Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World” by Isa Chandra Moskowitz.

This recipe was fairly easy to make, and didn’t require a trip to Whole Foods for some bizarre ingredient like agave nectar. It really only required me to buy soy milk, soy yogurt, cloves and cardamom. I already had everything else on hand.

You’ll notice that the cardamom isn’t there. That’s because a jar the size of that pepper container was $11.50. That tiny little jar of cloves was nearly $7! I wasn’t ready to part with almost $20 for two spices, so I skipped the cardamom. I’m sure it would have enhanced the cupcakes that much more, but yikes, with the economy this bad, who can spend that much on spices?

Step one in this recipe was to heat the soy milk and then add black tea bags and let them steep for ten minutes. Once that was over, I ended up with this:

That was added to the yogurt, as well as oil and sugar and whisked until the yogurt lumps were gone. Then I mixed in the dry ingredients, which included what amounted to an entire spice rack. Cinnamon, cloves, ginger and even pepper went into the mix! Once everything was combined, the batter (which was incredibly thin) went into the cupcake tins:

The recipe instructed me to fill the tins completely up. Once they baked for 20 minutes, I ended up with this:

I hate it when cupcakes have that little ridge around the edges, where they puff out and over the tops of the tins. My advice for this recipe would be to not fill them up all the way, but almost. The batter made eight cupcakes, but I really should have divided it out better and made nine. I think they would have come out without that little ridge if I had.

The recipe advised a simple powdered sugar/cinnamon/nutmeg/cocoa powder dusting, but I gave Rob the option of that or the vegan buttercream frosting. He went with the powdered sugar concoction, which I think was probably the best decision. I think a buttercream would have overpowered the spiciness of the cupcakes.

I decided to get a little fancy with the decoration, seeing as how these were part of Rob’s birthday present! So I made a little stencil out of tin foil for the cocoa powder/cinnamon/nutmeg part of the equation:

I think they came out pretty cute!

The cupcakes tasted really good, although they had almost more of a muffin consistency than that of a cupcake. I don’t mind. I like muffins, too!

I can’t believe I’ve already baked a month’s worth of stuff! I kind of threw off the schedule by baking something on Saturday instead of Wednesday. I plan to bake again on Saturday for my next two projects. Next week will be Peanut Butter Bombs, a favorite of a friend of mine who is a vegan chef. The week after that will be Vegan Vanilla and Chocolate Cupcakes, which will serve a dual purpose. But more on that in two weeks.

This recipe required me to buy some new toys, which made me very happy. I went to Crate & Barrel for these:

That’s a bench scraper, a French rolling pin and a loaf pan. As it turned out, I didn’t actually need the rolling pin (I smooshed the dough out with my hands), but I will need it eventually. These three items set me back less than $25.

This was also the first time that I got to use the dough hook on my KitchenAid mixer. I’ve now officially used all three attachments that came with it. Sooner or later, I’ll get that pasta attachment, but that’s another blog.

YARRRR!

With everything in place, it was time to start. I mixed cinnamon, sugar and brown sugar together in a bowl, then milk, butter and eggs in a mixing cup, and then started dumping the flour, yeast and salt into the mixing bowl. Once the dry ingredients went in, I added the wet and started kneading:

(How many photos did I have to take to get a decent shot? Three.)

Once the dough had cleared the sides of the bowl, but still stuck to the bottom, I turned it out onto a ‘lightly floured’ counter. This time, ‘lightly floured’ actually meant ‘lightly floured’:

Once the dough was kneaded into a smooth, elastic ball, it went into a greased bowl with greased plastic wrap and sat for a little over an hour to double in size. Once that was achieved, I turned the dough back out onto the counter and smooshed it out into a rectangle. I then wet the dough and sprinkled the cinnamon/sugar/brown sugar mixture on top. Then it got dampened again. I would have taken a picture of this, but my hands were covered in cinnamon and I didn’t want to gum up my camera. The dough then was rolled up jelly-roll style and dumped into the loaf pan:

From there, it was left for another hour to rise again. Once that was achieved, the top was brushed with butter and sprinkled with some reserved cinnamon/sugar/brown sugar mixture. Then it went into a 350 degree oven for “40 to 60 minutes.” The ambiguous times in this particular recipe irked me a bit. I know that ovens are finicky and you have to watch your food rather than rely on a clock, but twenty minutes??? I’m not going to sit in front of my oven starting at the 40 minute mark and just wait. So I set the timer for 25 minutes, at which point I rotated the pan. Then I set it for another 25. This is what I got:

I think it turned out fine. I shook it out of the pan:

It kind of looked like a covered wagon. My only issue with the loaf was that one end was pointed up and the other end was pointed down. I’m not sure how I could have fixed that. I’ll have to look into if/when I bake another loaf of bread.

Finally, after some cooling, it was time to cut into the bread and see what happened on the inside!

HOLY COW IT WORKED! Look at that swirl!

I’m so glad this worked out! The bread is DELICIOUS and may be the best thing I’ve made so far.

Tune in next week when I make Vegan Chai Latte Cupcakes for Rob’s birthday!

You know how sometimes you start a project, and a fourth of the way through it, you find yourself thinking, “There’s no way this is going to work?”

That’s how these scones started out.

When I mixed the dry and wet ingredients, the dough was super sticky. The recipe instructed me to turn the dough out onto a ‘lightly floured’ counter and ‘lightly flour’ the dough enough that it wouldn’t stick.

I apparently have no concept of what ‘lightly flour’ looks like, because when I used a ‘light’ amount of flour, the dough stuck like crazy. So I floured it more. And more. And more. By the time I got these things in the oven, I discovered that ‘lightly flour’ actually means ‘use more flour to dust the counter than you actually put in the recipe’.

I finally got a ball of dough together that looked like this:

From there, I had to roll the dough out into a sqaure, then fold the square on itself, and then put it in the freezer for five minutes. This was the point where I thought it wasn’t going to happen. I couldn’t unstick the flour from the counter without tearing it apart. So I did the best I could and stuck the blob in the freezer.

After five minutes, I took it out and rolled it into another square, at which point I studded it with the blueberries:

(Side note: I’m not the biggest fan of raw blueberries. I tend to only eat them in muffins and pancakes. I didn’t realize they’re not blue on the inside! I was so disappointed.)

Once the blueberries were down, I rolled it up jelly-roll style (with some more sticking and more flouring). Once it got rolled up, I smooshed it down and started cutting:

Once they were cut into scone-like triangles, I put them on the baking sheet with My Precious, the Silpat:

A little baking and voila!:

Close up:

So I guess the lesson is to have faith in your abilities. If you’ve proven yourself good at something, take a chance and try something a little different in that field. It might start out a little rough, but if you rely on your past knowledge, it’ll usually turn out all right.

The only problem I had with these scones is that they created a TON of dishes:

Next week is the season premiere of “Lost” and Rob and I are having some friends over. I plan to bake some Cinnamon Swirl Bread that will be easy to grab blindly off a plate while our eyes are glued to the television screen.

So I knew I wanted to bake a cake from this book. I settled on the Red Velvet Cake.

The recipe calls for cake flour, which I didn’t have in my pantry. I had All-Purpose and Self Rising, so I went on a search for cake flour. Giant Eagle turned up nothing, so one day after work I hit up Trader Joe’s, thinking they would probably have it. Nada. So I drove 20 miles out of my way to Whole Foods, thinking they would DEFINITELY have it. Nothing! At this point, I was starting to freak out a little, and checking the Web to see if I could substitute something else for cake flour. Finally I decided I would try Kroger’s, just to see.

Lo and behold:

Armed with my ingredients, I set to work. The next problem occurred when I noticed that the recipe called for six tablespoons of red food coloring. This is the food coloring I had on hand:

I quickly realized that one of those little bottles of food coloring is just about one tablespoon. So I would have needed six of those bottles! I used up all the red in that four pack, and then found an extra bottle of red food coloring tucked away in the pantry. But it only had about half a tablespoon in it, so I was four and a half tablespoons short. It would have to do.

I think it worked out fine:

Even after baking, the cakes stayed red:

This was a three layer cake. I only have two springform pans, so I had to bake two of the layers and then let them cool for an hour in the pans before I could bake the third layer. As you can imagine, this was an all-day affair.

I used the Creamy Vanilla Frosting the cookbook suggested, which was very interesting. It required cooking milk and flour for ten minutes, and then mixing up FOUR sticks of butter with sugar and vanilla before mixing in the milk/flour mixture. It made a ton of frosting, which I thought was going to be way too much. I underestimated how much icing it takes to frost a three layer cake.

Finally, it was time to cut into this bad boy.

I plated our slices on our new dinner plates. They tasted fantastic, although in the future, I will know to cut the slices much much thinner. We couldn’t finish our pieces!

Tune in next week when I’ll be making scones!

But this year is different. Last year I really got into baking. It’s something for which I seem to have a talent, and it makes me happy. So it only makes sense to carry it over to 2009.

This year, I plan to bake something every week. The rules for this project are that each week I have to bake something I’ve never baked before, and it has to be somewhat challenging. No oatmeal cookies unless they involve some unique ingredients.

I plan to try out some vegan and gluten-free recipes, as well as the more traditional, but somewhat difficult, fare.

And with that, tune back in on Wednesday when I’ll be posting the results of my attempt of Red Velvet Cake.

Whisk me luck!