Presenting: Butterfly Girl!

Well, her costume any way. The "gauntlets" are too small when she's wearing a shirt, so I'll have to make new ones. Still, how cool is this?!

Turns out...

You can make a reasonably good vegan Chinese-style fried rice by using scrambled tofu (seasoned with salt, pepper, soy sauce and sesame oil) in place of the eggs.

Vegan doughnuts!

Yeast doughnuts are one of my "unicorn" treats. Commercially made with dairy and egg, time-consuming to make and also kind of dangerous (hot oil!), it's rare that I get to savour one. I've only recently begun attempting to make them myself. Unfortunately, the recipe I consulted used egg. Now that egg is a no-no for me, I was on the search for vegan yeast doughnuts. Spice Island Vegan saved the day.

The "fingers" pictured above are from the batch I fried up because I got impatient; these are first-rise only doughnuts, dusted in icing sugar. For the second-rise doughnuts I'll be making later today, I'll probably use Alton Brown's chocolate glaze recipe again. While I have no qualms with experimenting with various recipes until I get something right, there's just no sense in messing with something which you know works well.

Post-gorging update: Oh. Em. Gee. These are good. I think I like them more than conventional doughnuts. The coconut flavour that comes from using coconut oil as the fat component make these horribly addictive.

Update 2: SRSLY:

Dairy- and sugar-free chocolate pumpkin seed butter!

Having been inspired by Tofu vaVohu's post on Pumpkinseed Nutella, I thought I'd take a stab at making a dairy-free version, without refined sugar. It's not only possible, it's fantastic! My version follows:

• 1 cup pumpkin seeds (I left mine untoasted)
• scant ¼ cup cocoa powder
• 8 dates, presoaked in soy milk overnight
• pinch of salt
• ½ tsp. vanilla
• soy milk to desired consistency (I used at least ¼ cup)

Blend the pumpkinseeds in a food processor until they turn into a seed butter. Scrape down sides of bowl. Add remaining ingredients and blend, adding soy milk and scraping down bowl as needed.

I've already had very generous smears on two pieces of toast. This recipe's a keeper!

Spinach and tofu puff pastries for brunch!

I used the puff pastry recipe blogged about previously and the spinach and tofu filling I've used for my version of spanakopita to whip up today's brunch. I used vegan margarine instead of shortening for the puff pastry and prefer the latter; the use of salted fat for the pastry led me to suspect that the resultant pastry would be on the salty side, so I used a light hand with the salt content for the spinach filling. I did, however, add roasted garlic, lemon zest and nutmeg to it and was very happy with those additions.

Overall, I don't think I'd adjust the seasoning for any of this, but if I were to make it again, I use shortening in the puff pastry and season the filling so that I could eat it as-is.

Finally! Triple-chocolate cookies! Sort of.

Since these didn't work out, I thought I'd give it another go. Yesterday, I made up a batch of triple chocolate "chip" (in actuality, Lindt dark chocolate, soy chocolate and vegan chocolate cut into chunks) cookie dough, and have been baking small batches in our toaster oven on the convection setting.

Notes: Not bringing the chilled dough to room temperature for a half-hour results in a cookie in which the sugar burns. The white chocolate ends up melting into the cookie, so this is not a good use of "premium" white chocolate (i.e., one made exclusively with cocoa butter as the fat). Finally, chilling these after baking yields the best results: the chocolate sets again, making for a nice "bite" in the finished cookie.

Vegan White Chocolate, Part IV

Fittingly, this is a quadruple batch. I'm going to have to make sure I have vanilla paste or a vanilla bean to scrape the seeds out of next time. This batch is a bit astringent with the liquid vanilla in it.