Tiramisu Cupcakes

I have been wanting to make the Tiramisu Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World for weeks now. First I kept forgetting to buy Kahlua and then I would get busy and think I'd do it later. For some reason I was thinking these were going to be really complicated and take a long time to make. But no! They're just as fast as regular cupcakes, you probably take less than 5 minutes to cut out the centers and add the coffee/Kahlua mixture to the cake parts. So really, you have no more excuses for not making these. They're quite yummy.

I did think that the cream cheese frosting was way too sweet for me. When I make these again, I think I'll only add about half the powdered sugar. I might experiment with adding more of the faux cream cheese to see if I can get more of a less sweet, but still creamy sort of thing like real tiramisu has. I realize these are cupcakes and cupcakes have frosting, but I'm just weird like that.

I'm one of those that scrapes the frosting off of cupcakes so there's only a very thin layer left on top. Unless it's the cooked frosting recipe that's in VCTOTW with the red velvet cupcakes. That one is my favorite. It's so creamy and light and not too sweet. Perfect, but it doesn't really go with every flavor of cupcake.

Coming soon - a recipe for Strawberry Shortcake Cupcakes. :D

A Soup for All Seasons

Before I say anything else, I have to say that this might just be my favorite soup ever. Yes, ever. I think I liked it even more because I was slightly skeptical about it before I made it. Not that I thought it would be bad, Isa has never led me wrong so far. I just hadn't ever really had a soup that was like this. The closest thing was split pea or lentil soup, which aren't even close at all.

As the weather starts to warm and the markets are starting to fill up with fresh produce, a lot of us are looking for lighter meals than we did all winter. It's probably a good idea, especially if you ate as many cupcakes as comfort food as I probably did in the fall and winter. At this point you might be wondering if I'm having some sort of weird issue with writing this post. Okay... she's talking about soup. Now she's talking about summer and eating lighter... Okay, SaraJane, let's just sit down and look at some pretty cupcake pictures. That's a good girl.

But no! This soup is good no matter what season it is, I tell ya! Vegan with a Vengeance's White Bean and Roasted Garlic Soup is fan-freaking-tastic. It's light enough to have by itself as a meal without feeling all thick like you might after eating a heavier stew (or the aforementioned split pea soup or the like). Why not make some and have a cup with a sandwich? I've been addicted to some grilled sandwiches with faux cheese slices, tomatoes, sprouts and avocado. Yum! (put the sprouts and avocado on last, but grill it with the tomatoes already inside, between two vegan cheese slices.)

Another great thing about this soup, that's even better for the busier days of spring and summer? It's fast and very, very easy. If you have an immersion blender, it's even easier and you have only one pot to wash. If you don't have an immersion blender, I highly recommend it. You can get one for around $30. They're fantastic for blending soups, making hummus, pesto, and smoothies without making a big mess like a food processor or blender might.

Also - if you still don't have Vegan with a Vengeance, go out and buy it. It's the best cookbook I've ever owned. Hands down.


White Bean and Roasted Garlic Soup (from Vegan with a Vengeance)

2 Tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped (about 1 1/2 cup)
1 teaspoon salt
a few dashes of black pepper
1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds, crushed
4 cups vegetable broth
3 cups great northern or navy beans, drained and rinsed
3 fresh sage leaves, chopped
1 bay leaf
juice of 1/2 lemon, or to taste
2 heads of garlic, roasted (yes, heads, not cloves)

To roast the garlic: Preheat your oven to 350. Get as much of the papery stuff off the garlic as you can. Set them on a baking dish and bake for 30 minutes. Let them cool for at least 10 minutes before you start getting the rest of the papery stuff off. It comes off easily, but even easier if it's not still really freaking hot.

In a soup pot over medium-high heat, saute the onion with the olive oil for about 5-7 minutes. Add the salt, pepper and fennel and cook for another minute or so. Add the broth, beans, sage and bay leaf. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer, uncovered, for 5 minutes.

Remove the bay leaf and add the roasted garlic. Remove from heat and puree in batches in a food processor or blender, or if you're super awesome like me, use your immersion blender and have less dishes to wash. Add everything back to the pot if you did it the blender/processor way otherwise, it's still in the pot. Add the lemon juice and stir to combine.

Serve garnished with fresh fennel leaves or grated carrots or parsley. Enjoy!

Makes 6 servings.

Things that are Awesome - Heirloom Tomatoes

Heirloom tomatoes are awesome and you should grow some. Seriously, if you've never tried this type of tomato, you are going to be sooo excited come July and August. These tend to be more expensive, but they're only in season for a very short period of time and it's well worth it. Plus, they're cool looking.



So, yeah, it's not time for Heirloom tomatoes to start showing up in the markets just yet. But - if you have a garden or a patio/balcony where you can put a pot and grow some tomatoes, this post is for you. Sadly, I have the opposite of a green thumb, whatever that is (a black thumb?) so I won't be killing any tomato plants this year. But you should! Seriously, do it.

You can get certified organic seeds from Sur La Table. Yeah, I know, it's a chain store, blah, blah, blah, but these seeds are not only organic, but they come from a family farm in California. It says so right here. These guys should be giving me commission on this! I just got excited when I saw this and wished that I could actually grow things. I'm sure someone out there might want to. :D

Carrot Muffins and Linkage!

Because I can't bear to post without pictures, here are some of yummy Carrot Raisin Muffins from Vegan with a Vengeance. This was the first time I've made these. I don't know why I skipped them for so long. The VWAV muffins are my very favorite muffins to make. Yum! For some reason I expected these muffins to be super sweet like carrot cake, but - they were very nice and breakfasty, not cupcakey at all. The muffins I ate the next day were awesome cut in half, toasted lightly in the toaster oven and smeared with Earth Balance. Sooo good.

And even if you eat like 6 of them in one sitting, you can just tell yourself how great it is that you're eating so many carrots while you're doing it. Because we all know that carrots are good for you. So how can you go wrong?

Now for the getting down to business portion of the program. I need to add some links! Because I am quite forgetful and potentially distracted by shiny objects, give me a comment if you're not in my links and would like to be. :D Or you can just comment to tell me how freaking cute alpacas are. Because they are. Yes they are!!! Stop it. You're wrong. They're cute, so there. I knew you'd see it my way.

Kitties!

There are so many pictures of my cat, Piper, on the blog. I do have two other cats, so I wanted to show them being cute, too. Whenever I'm cooking, Piper loves to be in the kitchen. She usually sits on the top of the refrigerator and watches me. Sometimes she jumps down and tries to help, too. ;)

The other two pretty much decide to go in the living room and be as cute as possible in hopes that I'll leave the kitchen and give them lots of pets. It's a tried and true cat method. I mean, seriously. How could you resist this?

Or this?

:D And I wanted to share how beautiful Vancouver is in the spring. These pictures are from two weeks ago. If you can imagine, there are actually more trees bursting with blossoms now. It's amazingly beautiful. Even the air smells fragrant in some places.

Check me out. Two posts in one day! :D

Strawberry and Mango Cobbler

Some days I binge on Food Network. I actually really like Food Network Canada better than the programming in the states. Rock on, Canadia! (Yes, I did mean to spell it that way. :P) One of the shows I enjoy the most is Chef at Home. The cool thing about Michael Smith is that he's actually trying to teach people how to combine flavors and how to cook. Even when you look up one of his recipes on the website, he prefaces it with this:

"A recipe is merely words on paper; a guideline, a starting point from which to improvise. It cannot pretend to replace the practiced hand and telling glance of a watchful cook. For that reason feel free to stir your own ideas into this dish. When you cook it once, it becomes yours, so personalize it a bit. Add more of an ingredient you like or less of something you don't like. Try substituting one ingredient for another. Remember words have no flavour, you have to add your own!"

Awesomeness. So anyway, I'm watching his show one day and he's making this amazing strawberry and mango cobbler. Holy crap, yum! And then he did something really cool that I had never thought of before. Instead of melting margarine and mixing it in the dough, and instead of cutting in small cold pieces of margarine, he froze the dang stick and grated it in! What a freaking awesome idea. I think this could work for biscuits and other stuff like that. Especially if you don't have a pastry blender or if you get annoyed by trying to use one. I had some Earth Balance sticks that I just stuck in the freezer for whenever I felt like making something like this.

So after scribbling down the recipe (okay, who am I kidding. The OCD part of SaraJane wrote it down neatly in my cooking journal), I was kind of excited about trying this new technique with the EB. I was going to just substitute some of the fruit for others and THEN the market across the street from work put cases of mangos on sale for $7.99. Oh hell, yes. I totally carried that box of mangos home on the bus. Heh. That was kind of funny, I have to admit. Mangos are my all-time favorite food, so I was stoked. After forcing myself to stop eating nothing but mangos for days, I managed to save a few to cut up for this cobbler.

He used frozen fruit on the show. I froze mine and then had to thaw them out to use them. They were so juicy, I sort of had a block of mango in the freezer. Between the freezing and thawing and baking, they sort of liquified. Weird, right? They're still fine and the cobbler still tastes really good, but it looks a little weird. I guess either use frozen or fresh, but don't thaw the frozen ones.

Strawberry and Mango Cobbler

2 cups fresh or frozen strawberries
2 cups fresh or frozen mango
1/2 cup cup flour
1/2 cup sugar
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 cup flour
1/2 cup cornmeal
2 tbsp sugar
Pinch of salt
1/2 tbsp baking powder
1/2 cup margarine, frozen (one stick of Earth Balance is 1/2 cup)
1/2 cup soy milk


Preheat your oven to 375°F. Place fruit into a large bowl and toss well with the flour, sugar and lemon juice. Put the fruit mixture into a baking dish. I used one of those square pyrex ones. It's best if the fruit fills the dish but doesn't rise above the edges. You don't want to get hot bubbly fruit running over the edge of the dish as it cooks.

For the topping, stir together the flour, cornmeal, sugar, salt and baking powder. Grate in the frozen margarine and mix the dough together with either a wooden spoon or your fingers.

Pour in the soy milk and stir until mixture comes together and forms a rough dough. It'll be a bit dry, but that's what you want. Either use a spoon or your fingers and put the dough in pieces over the fruit, covering the entire top evenly.

Bake for 45 minutes.

Things That Are Awesome: Green & Black's Hot Chocolate

I've decided to start a semi-regular thing on my blog. Things that are awesome. Frequently I find gadgets or yummy packaged foods that I think everyone should know about. First up - chocolatey yumminess.

I have a love affair with Green & Black's chocolates. They're all fair trade and organic and almost all of them are vegan. You have seriously never tasted chocolate this amazing. You don't want to chew it, just put little pieces in your mouth and let it melt on your tongue. It's really unfair to yourself to eat it faster than that. Plus, the chocolate lasts a little longer that way because you'll end up eating less each time.

Green & Black's is a UK company and they have some flavors across the pond that we can't get over here. I've actually had a friend of mine from over there send me some because she knew how much I like it. And let me say this, too: I'm not a chocolate fiend. I don't eat chocolate very often, I have to be in the mood for it. I'm more of a salty craving gal. Give me some fries or plain potato chips or Tings over chocolate any day. Unless you're going to offer me some Green & Black's.

Loving Green & Black's the way I do, I was intrigued when I saw that they had hot chocolate. I actually found this the first time in the drug store. Sometimes it pays to walk down an aisle randomly. I never ever buy hot chocolate because I'm rather partial to the way I make it from scratch. It's so easy to do it yourself and hot chocolate mixes always pale in flavor in comparison to homemade. Until now!

Check out what it looks like, too. This is no wimpy powdered mix, this is little tiny pieces of chocolate. You know what else is awesome? If you ever wish you could have hot chocolate when you're not at home, you can use this. Get some of those little single servings thingies of soy milk and keep them at work along with this and you can have a nice afternoon snack.

I actually really like to cut up some Sweet & Sara marshmallows and let them swim around in the chocolateyness. That is a fantastic way to give yourself some dessert after dinner without eating those last 3 cupcakes that are calling your name.

Even Piper wants some!