Just can't get knafeh, Take II

Thought I'd give this recipe another go, this time attempting to temper the chocolate. For reference, I used the seeding technique that Ann Reardon shared, where one cools the melted chocolate to 97°F/36°C, adds a chunk of tempered chocolate, and stirs 'til the mixture reaches 91°F/32°C, then removes the chocolate chunk. I'm astonished at how well this technique works. This is, without question, the easiest tempering method I've ever used and the results turned out great! This picture shows the bar after it's been out at room temperature for about 3 hours.

For this (full-sized for reasons) batch, I ended up being about 10g short of pumpkin seed butter, so I substituted in the same amount of sunflower seed butter with no noticeable difference. I also ended up dropping a chunk of cocoa butter on the floor (NOOOOOOOOOO!), so I'm going to have to replenish my stock if I'm making this bar again.

Overall, I'd call this a massive success, 'though.

Vegan nanaimo bars!

I finally decided to "bite the bullet" and try my hand at making Nanaimo bars at home. It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken's Perfect Vegan Nanaimo Bars looked promising, so I took the opportunity afforded to me by Kara's PA Day yesterday to actually make a batch. I omitted the nuts called for in the base, and used baking chocolate instead of chocolate chips, but otherwise made no changes.

I like these a lot. The bitterness of using dark chocolate provides a nice balance to what would otherwise likely be too sweet a dessert for my liking. Matt pointed out that the base is a bit thicker than most, and I think he's right. I'd probably scale everything back to 75% there if I make these again. I'd also like to experiment with making an ermine frosting/custard middle layer — I feel that the middle layer wasn't as thick as it often is, but I wouldn't want to add more sugar to that layer. But I'll happily eat these as-is!

Homemade baklava!

I had leftover phyllo after having made the me-friendly Can't Get Knafeh of It chocolate bar, so after slicing an additional 70g off for the purposes of making a second bar if I so choose, I was left with 340g or about 75% of a full recipe's worth of phyllo for Fifteen Spatulas' homemade Baklava recipe. I'd made it in the past — substituting in a mix of pumpkin and sunflower seeds for the nuts — and was very pleased with the results. Kara, however, is not a fan of sweetened citrus, so she asked that that component be omitted in the future. Here are the ingredient amounts and substitutions I used for this reduced-sized batch (which was baked in two loaf pans, rather than one large pan):

Filling (of which 150g went unused, so everything here can be reduced to 70%)

• 500g raw, hulled, unsalted sunflower seeds
• 1 ½ tsp ground cinnamon
• ¼ tsp fresh-ground cardamom (husks removed)
• ¼ tsp fresh-ground cloves
• ¼ tsp salt

Pastry component

• 340g phyllo dough
• 95g vegan butter, melted

Syrup

• ¾ cup water
• ¾ cup sugar
• ½ cup honey
• 1 cinnamon stick

I think I'd like to try halving the amount of sugar in the sugar/honey syrup next time, since the dessert's a bit sweeter than I typically prefer, but I admit that the overall flavour profile has mellowed since we had our first slices last night after dinner. It seems less sweet today.

Just can't get (vegan, allergen-free) knafeh

It's been a long time since I first heard of the "Viral Dubai" (ugh)/FIX Dessert Can't Get Knafeh of It chocolate bar. Obviously, a bar that uses tree nuts, sesame and dairy wasn't going to work well for me regardless, so I was happy to see that there were creators like Emmymade who were sharing their homemade recipes for the dessert. Emmy's video in particular confirmed that the textural experience alone was worth attempting to adapt this treat to my sensitivities at least once.

So I had Caty order the Fidqiog Chocolate Bar Mold for me when she recently had Amazon Prime. I also made sure I had phyllo dough on-hand, a jar of pumpkin seed butter, cocoa butter, dairy-free chocolate and a good quality plant-based butter.

Caty got the mold to me at Em and Austin's housewarming party this past Saturday and I had the time to be able to assemble a bar today. Here are the ingredients I used:

Pumpkin Seed Cream (Pistachio Cream substitute)

• 55g 42g cocoa butter
• 125g 95g pumpkin seed butter
• 25g 20g icing sugar
• additional sugar to taste (I added 4g 3g granulated sugar to the complete filling mix)

Crispy, feuilletine-inspired kaitifi

• 30g 23g vegan butter
• 25g 20g granulated sugar
• 70g 53g knife-shredded phyllo pastry

Also

• 250g dairy-free chocolate

Method:

1. In a double boiler, melt cocoa butter over medium heat. Add pumpkin seed butter and stir until well incorporated. Sift in icing sugar. Stir well. Set aside.
2. In a shallow pan, melt vegan butter over medium-low heat. Add sugar and watch until sugar becomes golden. Take off heat and immediately add kaitifi/shredded phyllo pastry. Toss pastry to coat. Set aside to cool.
3. Taste a small amount of the golden kaitifi. If it's not crispy, spread the pastry shreds out on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake at 350°F until golden brown. Set aside to cool.
4. When kaitifi is cooled down, stir into the pumpkin seed cream. Taste. Add additional sugar as necessary to sweeten the filling as desired.
5. In a double boiler, melt chocolate over medium-low heat, stirring as necessary to ensure smoothness. If required, temper chocolate.
6. Pour chocolate into mold, then turn mold to coat the insides. Allow to set for approximately 5 minutes. Pour excess chocolate back out into a separate bowl.
7. Cool mold in the fridge for approximately 5 minutes to set the top and sides of the chocolate bar.
8. Spoon filling into bottom of the mold. Chill for an additional 5-15 minutes to set the filling.
9. Pour the remaining chocolate over the bottom of the bar (the top of the mold), scrape off excess. Chill for approximately 5 minutes until set.

This makes a big bar of chocolate. Matt, Kara and I each had ⅓ of a row (each row is ⅕ of the total bar) for each of the two servings we shared today.

I really enjoy the way the flavours and textures come together here, and I think adding a hard-crack caramel to the kaitifi component is the way to go; it adds extra crunch to the experience, which I think saves it from resembling the "Shredded Wheat" element that others have noted. Also, I think it was the better choice that I went with a "stiffer" filling than some of the versions I've seen. This is sweet without being cloying, crispy, crunchy, gooey without being messy and blends flavours well. I could see me making this again, despite the amount of work it takes.

Next day edit: I forgot to note that I had 85g of filling left over when I made up the original batch, which I'm calculating to be about 25% of the total, so I've adjusted the filling amounts to be 75% of what I used.

Chocolate cupcakes with coffee-caramel ermine frosting

These are the go-to chocolate cupcakes that I've blogged about previously. I also thought I'd try making an ermine frosting, using Cupcake Jemma's Ermine Buttercream as my jumping-off point. Of note, the flour/sugar mixture that gets toasted in the beginning was probably starting to caramellize a bit when I added the coconut milk to it, so I accidentally ended up with a delightful caramel frosting that I also added about 1/2 tsp of of instant coffee granules to, to get a coffee-caramel result (I was inspired by our local vegan doughnut shop's chocolate coffee toffee flavoured doughnut).

The frosting turned out incredibly delicious, but — as is often the case when I'm using soy-free margarine in place of butter — the result was less firm than I was hoping for. I think I might mess around with the flour ratios in the future to try to stabilize it further. Also, the recipe makes at least three times more frosting than was necessary for a batch of a dozen cupcakes, so I could easily halve the amounts to get a good amount of frosting for a dozen cupcakes in the future. In the plus column, I now have a lot of frosting ready-to-go, in the freezer.

My version as follows:

75g All-Purpose Flour
400g Granulated Sugar
460g Coconut Milk
460g Soy-Free Vegan Margarine

Sea Salt to taste
Instant Coffee Granules to taste
1 tsp Vanilla Extract to taste

Vegan Pudding Chômeur II

Cake

• 110 g all-purpose flour
• 55 g whole wheat flour
• 105 g white granulated sugar
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
(left this quantity as-is, because I found the original recipe tasted a little too much of baking soda)
• 1/8 tsp salt, plus about 1/16 tsp salt
• 75 g neutral oil
• 113 g plain vegan yogurt
• 3/4 tsp vanilla extract

Sauce

• 225 g maple syrup (I was able to find late-season Grade A Amber by the can(!) at the local Farm Boy)
• 50 g plant based milk
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• pinch of salt
• splash of apple cider vinegar

The last batch of these ended up being sweeter than I'd have cared for, so — while I added 50% to almost everything in the cake recipe to fill 6 ramekins — I kept the sauce quantity as-is in the original recipe. I didn't bother with cooking the sauce this time and it still turned out as intended. The cider vinegar was added to try to build some depth of flavour into the sauce, but I found it didn't make much of a difference. I found it surprising that the maple flavour didn't come through much at all, and think I'll try adding a bit of maple extract next time to try to boost that.

Finally got around to making Pudding Chômeur

Vegan Pudding Chômeur!

I used The Quaint Kitchen's recipe, making a batch-and-half to ensure I'd have enough to fill 6 ramekins. The vegan yogurt I used was President's Choice Coconut Cultured Yogurt, and I the plant "milk" was just the septic-packaged stuff I keep in the pantry (I think this time it was Silk brand).

Mini loaves of bread!

Here's the recipe I used as a reference. I ended up subbing in 1/3 of the flour with whole wheat flour, as well as 15 g of vital wheat gluten. I also used melted margarine in place of the olive oil.

Butter Chicken Pizza!

I've been using up leftover butter chicken (when such a thing exists — this one's made with KFI's Vegan Butter Chicken Sauce) by using The Kitchn's No Knead Bread recipe as a jumping-off point for making a batch of pizza dough (replacing ⅓ of the a.p. flour with whole wheat flour), putting that on a sheet pan, and topping it with the yummy-ness.

It's been such a hit that it gets made fairly often around here these days.

Beef Birria Tacos!

Made up a pot of beef birria last Friday, using Joshua Weissman's Beef Quesa Tacos as my jumping-off point. My adaptations included having all 3 lbs. of beef be beef rib "finger meat", using 6 guajillo chiles in place of all of the chiles, freshly-ground black pepper in place of the peppercorns, and replacing the fresh oregano with half the amount of dried oregano. The flavour is amazingly complex and satisfying.

The picture above is of the beef birria served on half-corn and half-flour tortillas, with quick-pickled shallots (salt, sugar, and lime juice were added) and fresh cilantro. This is one of my favourite things to have ever eaten.

Pumpkin doughnuts with coconut glaze

I've had Pro Home Cooks/Brothers Green Eats/Mike G's "Healthy" Doughnut recipe on my to-do list ever since it was published a couple of years ago. The promise of a good, but not overly sweet, doughnut glaze was tempting. I took the occasion of Caty's birthday a couple of days ago to make my own version (as, obviously, mine cannot include butter, milk or eggs).

Kabocha Pumpkin Doughnut

• one 398 mL can pureed pumpkin (the stuff in my cupboard happened to be organic)
• 4 T (60 g) vegan margarine, melted
• 1 cup (250 mL) hemp milk
• 1 T (15 mL) honey
• 1 T yeast
• the equivalent of 2 eggs in egg replacer powder
• 5 cups of flour
• ½ t salt

I melted the margarine and added the room-temperature hemp milk, pulling the mixture off the heat. It was lukewarm at this point and I added the honey and stirred in the yeast. Into the large bowl of my stand mixer, I added the flour, egg replacer powder and salt and used the dough hook to stir it together. Once the yeast mixture had formed a sponge, I added it and the pumpkin to the flour mixture and began the mixer on low. The original amount of flour called for in the recipe has nowhere near adequate, so I kept adding flour until I ended up with a wet dough, banking on it needing to rest to stop being sticky. I allowed that to proof, covered, for about an hour, then punched it down and began cutting out the doughnuts, laying them on parchment squares on a baking sheet for easy removal. Those were allowed to proof further, for an hour, under a floured cloth. For this batch, I fried the two "extra" doughnuts day-of, and allowed the remaining 12 to do a slow-rise overnight in the fridge. I can't say that the pumpkin really brings anything to this dough, unfortunately. It makes the dough denser than my ideal doughnut would be, but could be a good fritter base if I wanted to experiment with spicing it in the future.

As for the glaze, I adapted the original recipe as well.

Coconut Glaze (makes two batches worth)

• ~1 cup (half a 498 mL jar) coconut manna
• 1 tsp gelatin
• 1 T hemp milk, plus enough to get to desired consistency
• ¾ cup icing sugar
• pinch of salt
• ~1 tsp vanilla

I'd tried to use the recommended amount of sugar, but found that it was barely sweet, and would definitely not be sweet enough to make the doughnut worth eating, so I had to bump up the amount considerably. I am, however, a huge fan of using the coconut manna as a "filler"; it makes the glaze coconut-flavoured without being overpowering. I also found that the gelatin didn't cause the glaze to set up as nicely as it did for the original recipe — it was still a bit gel-like even when "dry". That said, I'd absolutely work with this again, seeing about omitting the gelatin entirely next time, and maybe using a coconut milk (or citrus juice!) instead of the hemp milk.

This was a decent "start" towards something really good, but I can't claim that I thought it was a great substitute for a traditional yeasted doughnut.

Refined-sugar free matcha cake!

A recent trip to the local "hippie" store saw me bringing home my first ever tin of matcha powder, which called to mind the green tea castella cakes which were ubiquitous in our old neighbourhood. I thought I'd try adapting the refined-sugar free cake recipe I developed several years ago. This version, then, uses:

• ⅔ c. coconut milk
• ½ t. apple cider vinegar
• 1 c. pitted dates (the Medjool ones were unavailable), soaked and drained
• ⅓ c. avocado oil
• 2 t. vanilla extract
• 1 c. packed all-purpose flour
• 1 T. matcha powder
• ¾ t. baking powder
• ½ t. baking soda
• ¼ t. salt

This cake was baked in a greased loaf pan for about 20 minutes at 325° F. The cake is very lightly sweet, tender and fluffy. It's a hit!

Snow day, so cookies!

Kara helped me bake up a batch of Mrs. Fields Chocolate Cream-Filled Hearts from the (very) out-of-print Mrs. Fields Cookie Book: 100 Recipes from the Kitchen of Mrs. Fields, or, at least, I think that's the book this recipe came from. Caty got it as part of a Scholastic order back when we were in elementary school, and I've long-since photocopied out the recipes I liked most. Strangely, I think this is the first time anyone in our family has made this recipe, but it's a keeper!

My only complaint has more to do with the butter substitute I use than the recipe itself. I've been using Earth Balance Soy Free in my baking so that I don't risk causing digestive troubles for myself, but it doesn't handle as well as butter does: it's much softer, which means that any attempts I've taken at making a sugar cookie (as in this case), results in very crumbly dough. I find I have to let it warm considerably before there's any structural cohesion while raw. When it's baked, it makes a good cookie, but getting it there is a task!

I also used a mini can of coconut milk for the heavy cream, and added a pinch of salt to the dough and the ganache.

These are good!

Much Better

This cross-section is from the second batch, following the two aforementioned letter-fold double turns and a full rise. These are the best homemade croissants I've made.

Kinda-Fail: Homemade, From-Scratch Croissants

It looks like my technique for attempting to make dairy-free croissants hadn't changed in over a decade. I'd make up a batch of puff pastry, roll it, and end up with under-baked dough in the resultant pastries. I've recently been following YouTuber Alex French Guy's croissant series, and realized early on that I wasn't going to bother with the more technically-intensive steps (like building a lamination device), but that I could reasonably aim for his recipe technique, which involves starting with a yeast bread and laminating that. I've had great success with the bread recipe from The Complete Guide to Cooking Techniques, and wanted to try using that dough as my jumping-off point. And so it was, with Kara home with a cold and all of us house-bound with blizzard conditions yesterday, I worked on a croissant dough.

Sadly, I suspect I didn't give the dough enough time to rest between rollings, and found that the croissants weren't "flaky", so much as pleasantly bread-like with odd cracker-like leaves. I gave the remaining half-batch of dough another two letter-fold turns this morning in the hopes that I'll have created a flakier pastry. We shall see. If this doesn't work as intended, I think I'll modify my technique so that I'm brushing or rubbing the fat between the layers, rather than trying to encase it. I'm thinking that the soy-free margarine I'm using, because it's softer than butter when refrigerated, just doesn't have the structure I need to keep it manageable, and that's affecting the texture.

Homemade veggie dumplings with whole wheat wrappers

On Sunday, I made a batch of veggie dumpling filling using onion, shallot, garlic, ginger, shitake and cremini mushrooms, and cabbage. Today, I made up a batch of whole wheat dumpling wrappers, using China Sichuan Food's Dumpling Wrappers recipe as my reference, but replacing ⅓ of the flour with whole wheat flour. I was able to use up ½ of the dough — creating twenty 16g wrappers — on the filling, freezing half of the batch for later.

The dumplings hit the spot and I think I'll use up the remaining dough on a batch of beef and onion filling I can make up with stuff in my pantry and freezer.

Chinese green onion pancakes!

In light of the fact that this weekend's likely to be fairly cooking-intensive (it's going to be our first Christmas gathering at the new house!), we're doing soup and sandwiches for dinners this week. Consequently, this means there are odds and ends in the fridge. Given that I've got about ¼ lb. of cooked roast pork to use up, plus a few avocadoes, plus a bit of leaf lettuce, and had a bunch of green onions, I decided to make up a batch of Chinese green onion pancakes (having had the forethought to pick up garlic hoisin sauce and sunflower oil — which I use as a sesame oil substitute), and make wraps.

I used the quantities provided by Chef John's Chinese Scallion Pancakes recipe, with the modifications suggested by "Huadong Feng" (currently the pinned comment in that video's comment thread), using chopped, whole green onion, and cooking the onion in oil. I departed from those by then adding flour to the cooked onion and oil mixture until my roux was pale blonde.

Pictured is the first cooked pancake of the day. Not pictured are the wraps I made, stuffed with chopped pork, hoisin, avocado, and leaf lettuce (which is about as close to Heaven as you can get in food-form, methinks).

First batch of (this home) homemade bread!

This recipe is from the much-admired (around these parts) The Complete Guide to Cooking Techniques by Norma Macmillan (which is also the cookbook that taught me how to make risotto and pie crust). This is also the first time I used the dough hook on my 15 year-old KitchenAid stand mixer. It kneaded the dough considerably faster than I could have, for a double-batch of bread dough. I think I'll use it again.

Let there be light

After an entire year of inactivity due to Kara's decision that she didn't like the taste of "burnt" (read: charred) food, the grill was fired up for Saturday's housewarming at our place.

Before the guests arrived, I grilled up a couple of breakfast hamburgers for her and me, and am exceedingly pleased to announce that Kara deemed her burger "the best". She then proceeded to heap praises upon my cooking technique, to which I responded that the grill really was responsible for that amazing flavour. Looks like we'll get to use it a few more times before Winter sets in!

Our first-ever batch of scratch-made homemade dumplings!

Yesterday's cool weather and the general sense of mild exhaustion that came following a two-night-visit from Caty at our new house led us to finally getting around to making homemade dumplings.

We followed China Sichuan Food's Dumpling Wrappers recipe for the skins, portioning the dough into 4 batches before further breaking those down into 15-12 portions per quarter. In total, about 50 dumplings were made — and about half were consumed! The remainder are freezing on a waxed paper-lined sheet tray in the freezer. As I got more practice, the dumplings became much more even in shape, too.

For the filling, I had to hand-chop a little over a pound of pork belly (my food processor simply didn't want to further break up the chunks I'd cut — a feat which my now slightly-sore right shoulder is a bit peeved about), a little less than a pound of cooked ground chicken (that Kara decided she didn't want to eat earlier in the week), a bunch of chopped green onions, a head of chopped garlic, a knob of chopped ginger, a few mushrooms I had leftover from an earlier pizza-making venture, Chinese cooking wine, tamari, President's Choice 5-Spice Blend, salt, white pepper, and freshly-ground black pepper. About 1/3 of the filling is unused and went into a freezer bag for later.

While these are far from the most photogenic of Chinese dumplings ever made, the flavour was phenomenal! I went heavy-handed with the ginger and don't regret it in the least.