What Do You Want Me to Make?

So,
I have some ideas for what to bake/make next Saturday, but I always have such a hard time deciding... so what recipe appeals to you the most? Which one are you wanting me to experiment with? Let me know in the comments, and here are your choices :)

1. My Triple-Chocolate Cheesecake

2. Almond-Poppyseed Muffins

3. Work on my Choco-Choco-Chip Cookies

4. Tropical Muffins (something I've concocted in my mind which theoretically includes pineapple and mango, yumyumyumyumyum!)

5. Vegan Mac&Cheese (this might not work since I might not be able to go to a specific store and get all the ingredients before next Saturday)

6. Anything else you can think of that sounds particularly delightful

Please let me know!

COOKIES!

Choco-Choco-Choco-Chip Cooooookies!

Can you tell that I’m excited about chocolate chip cookies?

I have made so many batches of these in my lifetime, it’s rather ridiculous. I make them for my grandma’s birthday every year, I make them probably about five times every year at random times… mhmm, I have made these so often, I pretty much have the recipe memorized. But of course, now the recipe is different, because I made them animal friendly :)

So let’s begin the love fest!

Preheat oven to 375

Stir together these

2  1/2  C. Whole wheat flower (if you can, use whole wheat pastry flour; I have yet to get my hands on any, unfortunately)

2 C. All purpose flour

1tsp. salt

2 tsp. baking soda

Set aside and cream these until well… creamy

2 C. softened Earth Balance

2  1/2 C. sugar

2  1/2 C. packed brown sugar

Then, mix together your eggsis

4 tbs. ground flaxseeds whisked with 6 tbs. of water until gelatiney (made that word up…)

Then add these slowly/one at a time/in increments to your creamed sugary-butter

2 capfuls of vanilla

Your eggs

(oh I how love my flaxseed eggs!)

Slowly add your flour mixture

Then add these beauties

2 whole bags of Ghirardelli Semi-Sweet Chocolate Chips (these are the only vegan chips, so be careful!)

Roll into little balls and place on greased cookie sheet. You might want to press down on them slightly, since they won’t spread out much, if at all on their own.

They are cute in their little ball shapes though

Too cute to eat… almost

Then bake for about 10-12 minutes, until golden brown. But be careful not to over bake! They are rather inedible if baked too long, blech!

Pour yourself a tall glass of milk (almond, hemp, rice, soy, coconut, etc) and enjoy!

Muffin Mayhem! (Part 2)

Muffin Mayhem! (Chocolate Edition)

So, after I made my berry muffins, I made some chocolate muffins too…

Let me say this as a disclaimer, they were good, but not nearly chocolatey enough. You definitely need to add chocolate chips to the batter (I regrettably did not do this) and then they will be absolutely perfect!

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s begin!

Preheat oven to 345 (no berries to let sweat here)

And stir together the following

(yes, that is a very large bag of baking soda… we love both Costco and baking soda a whole heck of a lot)

3 Cups Flour

2 Tsp. Baking Soda

1/4 Tsp. Salt

1 Cup + 2 Tbsp. packed brown sugar

1/2 cup unsweet cocoa powder

Then, in a separate bowl, stir these together

1/2 Cup Vegetable Oil

1/2 Soy vanilla yogurt (I just used a whole carton)

2 Cup Almond Milk (or your other favorite milk alternative)

2 Tsp. Red Wine Vinegar

1 Tsp. Vanilla Extract

I’ve never used vinegar in baking before, and definitely not one that is red, so I was pretty skeptical. But I do think it made the muffin moister, and didn’t taste odd at all

After all that is combined, gently fold in the dry ingredients, and in this case, you do need to make sure not to over mix! You want to look slightly fluffy and airy… these are girly muffins :)

Grease your muffins pans and fill about 1/2 way full

Then, stir these together

Aprox. 3 Tbs vegan cream cheese (that’s all I had left over from the cinnamon rolls, but I will use more next time, since this was the best part of the muffin)

2 tsp unsweet cocoa

1 tsp powdered sugar

You want it to all be combined, like this

I also drizzled a little bit of vegan chocolate sauce on my half filled muffins, but if you cant find anything like that don’t worry (though you could just melt some chips)

Then scoop the cream cheese mixture into each pan, and cover with the remaining batter

Now you want to top with choco-choco-chips!

I have been conditioned all my life to think that these were the only chips worthy of consumption either by themselves, or through baking, and I am ever so happy to discover that they are animal friendly :)

Put as many or as few as you’d like

And press them lovingly into the batter slightly

(remember that when you do this, you will have added about a whole bag to the batter already…. Right?)

Then pop-em in the oven for about 20-25 minutes and viola! Chocolate muffins!

Like I said, they were good, the top part was the best best best, since the cream cheese stuff rose to the top and it was ever so delicious. The rest of the muffin was moist and nice, but bland and not chocolatey enough, it definitely needed some chips mixed in…

To eat mine, I drizzled some more of my chocolate sauce over it; a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do to get her fix

Muffin Mayhem! (Part 1)

Muffin Mayhem (Triple-Berry Edition)

Today is my dad’s birthday, he wanted muffins for breakfast; so earlier, I made my triple-berry muffins, and we all loved them….

Then later….

I made even more muffins

Chocolate muffins

Yumyumyumyumyum!

But let’s start with the berry muffins :)

It’s important to note that every time I bake things, I always change the recipe up the next time.

Case in point, these muffins. This my third time baking them, and they are considerably different than the ones I first experimented with.  But that’s just me perfecting my goodies!

Likewise, this time around I didn’t use any whole wheat flower, or flax seeds (I usually do) because my mom can’t eat those sort of things, and thus had until today, been unable to revel in the muffins everyone was raving about….

So, being the kind and loving (pah) daughter that I am, I used plain white flour, and cornstarch as the egg replacer instead of my beloved flax seeds. (Cornstarch is weeeeird; so weird, that I don’t like it, haha)

Anywho, let’s get started.

First things first: DO NOT PREHEAT YOUR OVEN, not yet at least. There is something much much much more important that you need to do!

Mix these together (you’ll be happy you did)

Take one cup of raspberries (heaping cup is much preferred)

And one cup of blueberries

And one cup of black berries (lol, see a patern?)

And place in a small/medium sauce pan over medium/low heat with sweetner of your choice.

I used ginger syrup which I found at World Market and it is so awesome that I am going to use it whenever I can from now on. I like it because it was ridiculously cheap (like two bucks I think) and it reminds me a lot of honey.

So take the sweetner of your choosing and eyeball about how much you want to use; don’t drown the poor things, just helping the release of their natural yummyness a bit.

Stir em around, and notice how juicy they’re becoming already… let them sit there while mixing the other stuff, and feel free to turn the heat up to medium/high in a few minutes to get it nice a bubbly. Act like you’re making jam.

Now you can preheat your oven to 385

Then, mix together the following

6 c. minus 3 tbs all purpose flour (I usually do 4 c. flour and 2 c. whole wheat)

2tsps baking soda (haha, while typing this I realized that I totally left the baking soda out this time around… woops)

4 tsps baking powder

Heavy pinch of salt (mmmmmmmh, sodium does my heart good)

And set aside

Then, whisk together the following beauties

2 c. sugar

1 c. vegetable oil

2 cap-fulls of vanilla (honestly, I just dump some in till I think there’s enough… I am so professional)

Your egg replacer (I usually use 5 tbs of ground flaxseed whisked with 6 tbs of water, but today I used about 2 ½ tbs cornstarch whisked with 3 tbs of water… like I said, it was really weird, and I don’t recommend it. Stick with flaxseeds, they’re loads healthier anyway)

2 c. vegan yogurt (any kind will do. I’ve even used coconut milk yogurt and it was yummy. Likewise, any flavor will do. I’ve vanilla but it was too plain for my preference, so now I use berry flavored)

Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients and beat together

I know muffin recipes are always telling you to “be careful not to over mix the batter! The world will end if you over mix the batter even just a teeny-weensy-intsy-bintsy-little-bit!” and for every other muffin recipe, they are totally correct.

However, these muffins are some bad bad boys, and they need some sense beat into them.

So beat the heck out of them, and don’t stop, even if they start to beg.

See how thick that is?

These are some dense, manly muffins… no crumbly, air puffed girly muffins!

Now add about 2 cups of blueberries

Make sure to leave about a handful of blueberries though!

And “fold” into the batter

It was also at this point that I realized I had a ton of raspberries and blackberries left over, so I folded those in too

Just make sure to leave a handful of each

Now, grease your muffin pans

I am in love with my ginormous muffin pans!

See the difference?

Mhmm, I live in Texas, and only large, Texas-sized muffins are good enough for me!

Pour/scoop in the muffin batter and fill the cups about ¼ of the way full

Now, your berries on the stove should be oh so thick and scrumptious looking, stir a couple times more, getting all the good stuff off the bottom

And then spoon a heaping spoonful on top of each muffin

You can use up all the berry jam, since this only made me enough for my six large muffins

Then, pour more batter on top till the cups are pretty much full (mine where full)

Now, combine these

1 c. granola

1/2 c. flour

1/2 c. packed brown sugar

Pinch salt

And 6 tbs of cold earth balance

You want this to be all crumbly like a pie crust before you press it down into the pan

Now sprinkle it over your muffins, don’t be stingy

And place one of each berry on top

Bake for about 20-25 minutes (depending on what size muffin pans you use)

Make sure you let this cool in the pan for a good ten minutes before taking them out, because if you don’t this might happen to you

Don’t get me wrong, it was delicious, but definitely felt like I was eating a cobbler, not a muffin

And be patient when taking them out of the pan, these are gourmet muffins, and thus deserve your extra love and patience

If all goes well, they should come out intact and beautiful

Enjoy!

Look at that filling!

"May I have a muffin?"