faeryspacecakes

Woah! I need to update this!

My partner's daughter asked me to bake her birthday cake! Hurrah! She specifically asked for it to be vegan too. *well chuffed*.

Now I need to BAKE BAKE BAKE and make something extra special for her.

photos soon!

AND my stomach hurts. I shouldn't be posting that in a baking journal really. *whinge whinge whinge*

On the plus side, my hair is nicely pink.

To make this more baking related: my US flatmate loves peanut butter and I was thinking of doing a cake with peanut buttery type icing for her birthday. The cake'll definitely be chocolate, but I was wondering if I should aim for a banana-y chocolate cake. Or would that be too many flavours? Ach, decisions decisions. She was going on about liking banana-y baked goods the other day you see.

Hmm.

I can't do anything where peanut butter predominates though, as apparently our peanut butter is inferior to the American variety... Hmm.

Just want to make something she'd like really, as she's really nice.

Grah. I've got insomnia. And I'm so geeky I tried to get to sleep again by doing course reading. Obviously I'm just being geeky in a different way now, by updating this. I'll try and do it more regularly, honest.

Ok. I've been giving veganism a bad name recently by basically eating hippy food. However, it's still all totally lush, so here are a couple of lovely winter-y soup/stew type things I've knocked up recently.

( butternut squash and lentil soupCollapse )

And another, along similar lines.

( sweet potato stewCollapse )

hello!

Haven't used this for so, so long. This update's a bit boring too, promise to put more funstuff up asap.

Anyway, made loads of lush salads for Mum and I this evening and wanted to remember!
( Read more...Collapse )

eggy is going back to Seattle soon :(
And we decided another vegan cooking marathon some of our mates who go to the vegan kitchen at the Holyrood.

I'll stick up some recipes and that later, but here's a vague idea of what we made:

We started off with salsa, guacamole and hummus (I like making dips) and lots of people brought crisps to dip.

Then we served up:
Falafel burgers in homemade Lebanese style thyme bread with salad.
Twice baked potatoes (crispy potato skins with mashed potato/tofutti/margariney goodness) - I need to get the recipe for these John!
Tabulleh (Lebanese bulgar wheat salad - lots of mint, flat parsley, lemon juice etc)
Roasted veg couscous salad.
Peanut noodle salad.
(Plus all the dips and stuff left over.)

And for pudding (everyone was stuffed by this point)
Pumpkin crack (lovely pumpkiny stuff with crumbly cinnamon topping) again, I need the recipe!
Fruit salad (mango, blueberries, strawberries, banana).
Chocolate-banana Star cookies.
And soy cream!

Honourable mentions have got to go to the lovely people who came along: __whitetrash__, year_x, superbagelboy, Nicola, dedletteroffice, stygia, Liam and, of course the 'lovely' cr4k.

Ace evening, thanks John, will miss you! :)

Matt bought a leek and didn't know what to do with it!

So we made soup.

The obvious thing to do would be leek and potato, but I'm in love with sweet potatoes (they're nutritious and gorgeous and release energy slowly too, so are the ultimate food in my book!).

Anyway, it was lush and really easy to do, so here's the recipe.
( Read more...Collapse )
It was so, so yummy :)

Rar, I wanted a quick, cheap, tasty dinner. Carrots and onion = cheap. I wanted to make carrot and coriander soup, but the shop had run out of the latter and I had dried but kind of wanted fresh, as I think fresh is what makes it really!

They did have basil though, so I decided to combine the two classic soup combinations and make tomato and carrot soup with basil and coriander.

( Read more...Collapse )

I'm going to make this into a bit of a food diary too! I won't necessarily do every day, but it'll be useful for me to have a vaguely public record of what I'm eating and stuff.

( Read more...Collapse )

The best cookbook I have in the world is the Usborne First Cookbook. It's old, it's tatty, it has a burn mark on it from when Arran and I left a hot saucepan on it... and it's certainly not vegan... but it's got lots of happy memories attached to it (I've had it since I was six) and some of it's veganizable.

Anyway. It was mavdog's birthday, so I decided to make psychedelic star cookies for him. I was going to look for a good vegan cookie recipe online but ended up just heavily modifying a recipe from the book instead.

It was based on a recipe called 'Iced Spice Biscuits' which I thought was totally magical when I was a kid.

I heavily modified it and made Double Chocolate Banana Star cookies!
( Read more...Collapse )

Oh yeah, and I made stuffed mushrooms for dinner yesterday too. They were ok, needed a bit of a kick though.

1)Chop up a small leek and a stick of celery, cover with a little boiling water, add a tsp stock powder and 2tsp ground cumin, then simmer until veggies are soft. Add 30g couscous, cover and keep simmering until most of the water's soaked up. Put to one side and cover until water's soaked up.
2) Chop up a tomato into chunks and a load of flat leaf parsley. Add to couscous mix. Stir in a tbsp lemon juice.
3) Mash up 1/2 block smoked tofu, add mashed tofu to mix and stir together.
4) Pile stuffing on top of two large, destalked, portabello mushrooms. Bake in the oven at 180 C for about 20 minutes or so, until the mushrooms are cooked through.

Arg, I'm so, so behind on this...

Anyway. Today I made a nice 'egg' fried rice type thing, only it wasn't that fried and the egg was tofu. It was good though! ( recipeCollapse )

I've been making salads for lunch, as I find whenever I eat anything with carbohydrate in it, it kind of makes me feel all heavy and sleepy and disinclined to work. I've been making sure it's a balanced salad though, with lots of different proteins and textures. I also want to fend off illness/fatigue as exam time = high stress and I don't want to fuck up my immune system by getting run down. Last year I got shingles, which was not good.

Stuff I've been doing:
- basing salads around chopped raw spinach instead of lettuce, as it has more nutritional value and loads of iron which is released due to...
- dressing involving vitamin c related things! I usually make mine by mixing equal measures of lemon and orange juices and apple juice concentrate plus some carroway seeds and grated fresh ginger (which is incidentally another ace immune system booster).
- OR, dressing involving flax seed oil, which gives me my omega 3s and 6s. The nicest one involves that, apple cider vinger, apple juice concentrate, oregano and tomato puree. Yum yum yum.
- Adding seeds/nuts/dried fruit. I don't add many (because of fattiness) but if they're chopped up a little goes a long way and makes the salad taste lush. I normally use 3 walnut halves and two dates if I'm using those, and a couple of teaspoons of pumpkin seeds if I'm using them. All good fats and other virtues! Some protein too.
- If I don't get protein from nuts/seeds I use beans/pulses of some sort. Usually kidney beans, black-eye beans, chickpeas etc. Normally they're leftovers from the night before!
- Failing all that protein-wise, there's always tofu! Marinated, smoked, hazelnut or basil tofus are all really good in salad.
- If I haven't had much for breakfast I might make a couscous based salad.
- Other ingredients I use can be all or a selection of: grated carrot, celery, sweetcorn, cucumber, peppers, lettuce... all that sort of good stuff.

Finally, I've got a fledgeling idea for a stew/casserole type thing but it didn't quite work last night...
It will involve sweet potato and leeks in a sort of sweetcorn and tomato sauce... I was going to type out what I did and get suggestions for amendments but I'm knackered, so I'll do it tomorrow. Night night xox