planet vegan scotland - posts tagged 'cake'

sheep, a candle, a cake and the sky

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 07:57:58 GMT

sheep

candle and bubbles

another soul searching Transformation Game was played… it really does embody that Findhorn-esque quality of sharing and discovering deep things openly with others, love it. Wonderful companion to the morning pages of The Artist’s Way.

40 - my life begins now then

sky gazing

Crimbo

festive cheer :)

ladybird

flower and butterfly

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 10:24:24 GMT

flower

butterfly

by Lucy

Gorgeous Graduation

geometry

pasta, beloved, postcards, books

cake

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 08:56:49 GMT

cake chocolate brambles

chocolate recipes including chocolate cake. More cake recipes here :D

bloggage, food and snow

blackcurrants and tyres

friends and mince pies

sweet things

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:45:07 GMT

Alpro soya milks and puddings

Have been sent some Alpro goodies to try We do like their soya milk. The only one I didn’t know about was the ‘milk alternative’ suitable from 1 year old. Lots of extra vitamins and iron in it (and surprisingly nice in nocaf!). The chocolate puddings are lush lush lush…

Blackcurrant smoothies, there have been a few more – here’s a before pic Layered up are borage flowers, gooseberries, blackcurrants, leaf beet, parsley, linseeds (flax), brazil nuts, bananas and apple juice.

smoothie to be

sweet red onion from garden - very pleased with these

blackcurrant cake - currants cooked in batter and raw squished into icing too

also made some banana muffins with lots of redcurrants in – no pic but very good

Charlotte's strawberry jam bubbling on cooker - taking 'sweet' to new levels!!

raw mom summit

woods, hands, feet, bread and soup…

catkins and cheeze

Spring pics

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:10:59 GMT

The only crocus to survive intensive rabbit grazing

beautiful biscuits for a ballet day with the girls...

cake too, no anorexic dancing here

poor mangled nut feeder - deer trample it to get the peanuts out!

soon there will be daffs

willow catkins and the sky

chives

parsley

free veg seeds from the bbc here

walnut cake and sheep

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:21:09 GMT

Vegan Easter has been updated

Walnut cake with a tablespoon of Nocaf added to the mix. It is not coffeeish as had intended but is very nice:

1st of March tomorrow, so will it get more springlike?

C is for China.

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:03:14 GMT

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

That's right - Happy Chinese New Year! I never miss an excuse to cook Chinese food. It was the first foreign cuisine I ever tried as a teenager and being as how China Town in Manchester is awesome I still have very fond memories of being skint but eating incredibly well at Pearl City, the Golden Rice Bowl and various other restaurants around that area of the City. Not to mention the fixation I developed on baby pickled eggplant serviced by one of the grocery stores in the neighbourhood on the way home from work!

Anyway, enough reminiscing (n_n) - another reason my love for Chinese cuisine is so enduring is that it's so easy to buy vegan-friendly produce at your local Chinese Supermarket. I'm not only talking about the mock meats and vegetarian stuffed buns and rolls, lets not forget the wide variety of iron-rich greens you can buy in bulk in the produce aisle, the vegetarian varieties of condiments like oyster sauce and even the jellies and sweets made using pectin, potato starch and agar instead of the preferred Western alternative - gelatine.
Any trip to the See-Woo supermarket in Glasgow is exciting enough - I don't know what half the stuff in there is, it's like being in some medicinal-smelling wonderland! - but on Sunday they had an impressively-colourful display of Chinese Dragons right by the entrance. As if that wasn't good enough, I also got my mitts on some fresh, soft and sweet tofu-fa in the chiller cabinet.

This is dessert tofu - basically soft tofu in a simple syrup. It was so good I ate half right out of the Styrofoam tub when I got home.

It has a texture reminiscent of those French-set yogurts we get in the UK, but with a much milder, cleaner flavour with just the right twang of sugary sweetness. Delicious!

clockwise l-r: steamed rice, Singapore noodles, chilli and salt shrimp, hoisin tofu puffs, sauteed greens.

Once I got home I started on our Chinese banquet. I made tofu puffs in hoisin sauce, chilli and salt 'shrimp', sauteed greens with spring onions in oyster sauce with vegetarian prawn crackers, steamed rice and Singapore noodles (lovelovelove these!) as accompaniments. I ensured I had all my ingredients prepared and my plates warmed before cooking so that everything went to the table hot and cooking time was kept desirably short. The flavours delivered an appropriate mix of sweet, spicy and salty as I had intended. McGonnagle in particular loves eating a wide variety of dishes at one sitting so she tucked in with great gusto. Ho-Tep fought me for the last few tofu puffs with the proclamation - 'I LOVE tofu!'. Earlier that day he'd announced 'I LOVE spicy things!' while eyeing up my wasabi seasoned pop seaweed. I gave in and let him try a few pieces which he consumed with much appreciation. As a curt nod to Valentines Day (we don't need to be reminded we love each other with edible pants and giant stuffed toys, thanks! We'll save that for EuroDisney.) we enjoyed some Yellow Tail Rose bubbles alongside our delicious feast. Ho-Tep looked at my fluted glass filled with pink fizz and proclaimed 'I LOVE fizzy things!' Nice try, boy, nice try!

And what better way to finish the meal than by settling down to enjoy Mulan with the kids and having a nice cup of green tea and a pink rabbit bun filled with yummy red bean paste!

Funnily enough, these adorable little buns - found in the freezer section - reminded me of the poppy-seed rolls me and my mum would swoon over from the Polish deli in Chorlton. Very good, very tasty but not oversweet. And as you can microwave the buns individually instead of steaming them all it means there's no temptation to eat all of them in one sitting! (-_o)
So as far as celebrating the Lunar New Year I think we did ok.

In Other News: McGonnagle couldn't pass-up the opportunity to dress up for her Valentines Disco at school earlier in the week.

Plus I received gifts of tea from two of my favourite people in the whole wide world through the post the other day - how exciting!!!

You can't smoke it but you can drink it!

My mum sent me a big bag of her bespoke blend of leaf tea - as recommended by great British actor Sir Michael Horden, no less! 1 part Twinings Earl Grey tea to 2 parts Typhoo. And you know, it really is as good as I remember it. Thanks Mama!

Then my fabulous friend Helen sent me a couple of posh fairtrade Earl Grey teabags from the London Tea Company. The search for the perfect cup of Earl Grey intensifies! Thanks, btw, all you lovely people who left me recommendations of different tea blends to try. I can feel another Earl Grey Report coming soon...

A for Australia

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:08:08 GMT

Just in time for Australia Day - well, maybe just a few days after - I've decided to start on River's 'Eat the World' challenge with that old Aussie favourite - Lamingtons.

Just to digress briefly, back when I regularly watched 'Neighbours' - an infamous Australian Soap opera - on BBC1 as a child, I remember hearing them discuss these little cakes and thinking they were called 'lemmingtons' which struck me as very odd, calling a chocolate-iced coconut rolled sponge after a rodent supposedly pre-disposed towards mass suicide off clifftops. 'Those crazy Aussies!' I thought, shrugging it off until years later when I googled it spontaneously and found I'd got it completely wrong and those tricksy Melbourne accents had thrown me off the scent!

Anyhow, the lamington is a plain sponge square dipped in chocolate icing and then rolled in desiccated coconut. You can have it as a whole sponge or split and sandwiched with cream before it's dipped in the icing. There are also regional variations on the filling - the aussies like a lemon filling while the kiwis favour strawberry jam. So being lazy yet intrigued by the variations, I decided to use strawberry yogurt as the egg replacer in my vanilla sponge and then proceed as if I were just making these soft little mouthfuls of sponge goodness plain. Plus the chocolate icing sounded like too much work and too much sugar too so I just melted a ton of chocolate instead...

Firstly, I baked the sponge. I used the recipe for vanilla cake in 'How It All Vegan!' with the aforementioned strawberry substitution - I doubled-up the recipe and then used a single serving carton of Asda's strawberry soya yogurt and that seemed to work out just fine. I baked the sponges in square pans in the morning and let them cool thoroughly before enlisting my little larakin to assist with the messy bit - dipping and rolling!

I melted seven - yes, seven! - 100g bars of dark chocolate with a tablespoon of Pure soya margarine in a saucepan and then we took turns dipping small squares of the sponge cake into the pan until we were thoroughly covered.

Immediately we rolled them in desiccated coconut I had out on a plate before transferring to a wire rack to cool. The idea is the chocolate soaks into the sponge and once it dries and hardens you get that irresistible combination of hard chocolate, chewy coconut with slightly sticky, moist sponge. Oh, yum!!!

Was it any good? I'd have to say a resounding 'yes!' thanks to the combination of textures and flavours. Plus, for any mums out there it's a really easy activity to do with small children which gives them the satisfaction of getting good and messy whilst at the same time transforming something plain into something really quite fancy looking. I'm sending a batch in to work with Skint Vegan Dad and we'll just have to work our way through the rest, I suppose... (n_n)
To all my Antipodean friends out there, Happy (belated) Australia Day!

Scottish macaroons

Sun, 24 Jan 2010 16:36:41 GMT

If you’re looking for a Scottish dish to make for Burns night other than haggis*, these are very good – nothing like the English item of the same name and containing the somewhat surprising ingredient of potato (undetectable, is lovely fondant) – the recipe is still up on Cat’s old blog with pics of them properly covered in coconut, of which we are out of this time…

other Scottish recipes on site include cranachan (traditional pud at Burns suppers), Balmoral pie, skirlie, bradies and mince with dumplings and here’s a previous Burns night posting from 2008 complete with haggis, poetry and music.

*note: do not serve the macaroons with neeps and tatties

planet vegan scotland - posts tagged 'cake'

sheep, a candle, a cake and the sky

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flower and butterfly

Related posts:

cake

Related posts:

sweet things

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Spring pics

walnut cake and sheep

C is for China.

A for Australia

Scottish macaroons