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.

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.

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.

Vegan for a week: Day 3

Featuring (tonight's dinner), vegan KFC original recipe chicken seitan!

As blogged about a season ago, this version uses seitan patties as per The Edgy Veg's chicken seitan patties, again using sesame oil in place of the tahini, and getting 8 patties to a batch. From there, I opted not to go with the pickle juice marinade, but instead used homemade egg replacement powder with about ¼ tsp of yellow mustard (as I didn't have any dry mustard for the KFC dredge) as the wet part of my dredge. I otherwise hewed very closely to the Original KFC dredge recipe, having only to replace the garlic salt with garlic powder.

I've been on — understandably — something of a vegan recipe video binge this week, and saw that some people who make seitan squeeze some of the excess liquid out before dredging. I did that with this patty and vastly prefer the result to the unpressed seitan patties I've used in the past.

For being three days into eating meat-free, I'm frankly surprised at how satisfying all of the food has been so far. It looks like I'll be enjoying tonight's dinner of KFC-style seitan with potato wedges.

Vegan for a week!

We had roast beef at mom and dad's on the 16^th, steak dinner on the 19^th, and yet more roast beef for dinners starting on the 21^st, skipping a day and finally ending the onslaught of beef dinners on the evening of the 23^rd. I was ready to go meatless for a while. Right now, I'm officially eating vegan, but I might let up a bit later in the week and allow eggs and/or fish.

Kara opted to have President's Choice Meat Lasagna — her favourite — with her dad for dinners early this week, and I chose to make up a batch of Mary's Test Kitchen's Beefy Seitan so that I could use up the cheesesteak-style toppings (shallots/onions, green bell peppers, mushrooms, and Daiya I gathered last week — knowing how much beef we'd be eating — yet neglected to use.

The seitan really does benefit from a bit of extra browning in an oiled pan and I think I'll try doubling the amount of flavouring agents in it the next time I make it. The resultant mock meat is most reminiscent of beef, but lacks the assertive flavour, despite the fact that the "broth" component smelled beefy. Still, it makes for a delicious lunch which I've been eating on "buttered" toast with Chipotle Vegenaise. Definitely not for cheesesteak purists, but amazing in its own right.

For yesterday's dinner, I made up a batch of green coconut curry rice as per The Complete Guide to Vegan Food Substitutions recipe for Red Coconut Curry Rice, substituting short grain brown rice for the Jasmine rice called for in the recipe, sunflower seed butter in place of the peanut butter, and green curry paste in place of the red. I stir-fried sliced carrot, onion, mushrooms, and green beans to serve over the rice. This marked the second time I've made this rice recipe and it's safe to say I love it.

For dessert, I ate a couple of vegan, date-sweetened brownies. They're the result of a recipe I've been working on for a while and am just about ready to publish, so stay tuned.

Mmmmm...homemade white chocolate

A trip to Michael's on Friday yielded a silicone chocolate mold, a purchase I resigned myself to when I had multiple failed attempts (and one, sad, lonely success) at molding chocolates in a polycarbonate mold. I'd previously consulted Ann Reardon's YouTube tutorial on How to Temper Chocolate and seemed to have gotten the knack for it, but couldn't verify that fact due to my failures at getting them to de-mold.

On Sunday, I whipped up a batch of vegan white chocolate on Saturday, tempered using a marble board, offset spatula and bench scraper, poured the mixture into my new mold, and — after setting in the fridge — de-molded successfully! Thus, I had beautiful, glossy, homemade, dairy-free white chocolate this weekend!

I believe the expression goes, "YAAAAAAASSSSSSSSSSSSS"

A few months ago, I discovered that the Colonel's "secret recipe" was supposedly leaked. At the time, I tried it on a few chicken pieces and found that the flavour was much too peppery and heavy on the oregano. Delicious, but overpowering on some fronts.

After a nasty gastrointestinal blowout early last weekend, I spent most of Saturday and Sunday loafing around on the couch, binge-watching vegan cooking channels on YouTube. And so I was reminded of my attempt at making vegan Chick-fil-A. It was then that I resolved to hybridize the two recipes and — hopefully — end up with something greater than the sum of its parts.

This time, I made the seitan patties as previously (replacing the tahini with sesame oil), but I got eight patties out of the batch, instead of the previous four. I still soaked the patties for a little less than an hour in pickle juice, but I used the KFC spice blend recipe, with halved amounts of white pepper and oregano, plus ⅓ cup of icing sugar and 1 tsp of baking powder, as my dredge. My binder was unsweetened hemp milk. Yesterday's fry-up, pictured above, had me cutting the patties into quarters, length-wise, before starting the pickle juice soak.

Oddly, when one cuts back on the pepper in the dredge, its lack of salt becomes noteable. I will have to add a bit more, going forward. Otherwise, these adaptations are definitely on the right track!

Happy Birthday, Matt!

Matt isn't shy with his opinions about pie. I admit that I made a very authentic (and painstaking and time-consuming) coconut cream pie early in our relationship, only to discover that authentic wasn't what he had in mind. And yeah, he makes no secret of the fact that cherry pie is his absolute favourite, but that he's had enough failed attempts at it that he's wary of attempting it anywhere unfamiliar. So, naturally, I thought I'd try my hand at it.

Lo, my cherry pie! Honestly, it's actually my go-to pie crust recipe with canned cherry filling in it (the local grocery store wasn't stocking frozen cherries). And I'll be surprised if it isn't exactly what he's looking for.

Las ketchup.

The wee one has returned to school today (in Grade 1!), so I actually have the opportunity to update my blog!

I've been experimenting with the new waffle iron, including an attempt at using my go-to vegan doughnut recipe as the "batter". I must admit that I vastly prefer the results from using the Bunner's-based batter, but this was good. Shown topping this batch of waffles is KFC-like boneless, skinless chicken breasts (for which I used hemp milk for the wash) and a sugar-free lucuma powder "butter" I've been making, based on my go-to white chocolate recipe. Really, none of those ingredients work ideally together, but they were still hungrily and gratefully devoured.

Next up was the batch of vegan doughnuts I made using the remainder of the dough from my waffle experiment. They all got dusted with powdered sugar. Useful technique picked up during this attempt: for circular doughnuts, keep the dough chilled while cutting.

Finally, Kara and I took another run at they No-Whey assortment, this time finding that the Choco NoNo's were vastly superior to anything else we've tried in the product range. We genuinely look forward to eating these again.

It's been a prolific Summer Break!

Homemade vegan waffles

Well, I didn't have all of the ingredients I needed on-hand to make up a batch of vegan waffles from the Bunner's cookbook, so I improvised. The result was bloody fantastic, 'though!

Update: now with picture!

Happy Birthday to me!

Today's treat to myself was the same vegan strawberry cake recipe I blogged about previously.

Such yum!

Product review: No Whey assortment

I wanted to love these. When you've got a company whose business model involves veganizing and reducing common allergens in familiar (and beloved!) candy bar recipes, and you've got a ton of food allergies including dairy, you can't help but want those recipes to be a resounding success.

Sadly, that wasn't the case for any of the four offerings from (the delightfully cheekily-named) No Whey Chocolate that I purchased today at the local Sobeys. I tried the — again, ridiculously cleverly-monikered — Pea Not Cups first. While these aren't bad as a candy bar, they're also decidedly not like the peanut butter cups everyone is familiar with. The filling doesn't carry much of a roasted flavour at all and someone's seriously under-salting it, too. If these were marketed less like those guys' candy bars and more like its own thing, I think they'd do fine, but they're simply not what they're being sold as.

Next was the No Whey candy bar, which boasts a nougat filling topped with a thin layer of gooey caramel before being enrobed in chocolate. Sounds like another ubiquitous candy bar, right? The problem is that this was almost completely unlike that. It's still tooth-decayingly-sweet, but the chocolatey coating on this bar ends up noticeably waxy. I can only assume that the caramel was good, but its flavour was indistinguishable from the rest of the bar. And the nougat was easily the worst part of the tasting. It was stiff and somewhat tough. This bar was easily my least favourite.

Well, at this point in the tasting, I desperately wanted a win, so I went to the bar that I'd been most taken with when I made the purchase, the Milkless Polar Dream White. It's the most convincing of the lot. It's got a good creamy quality, but, unfortunately, doesn't "read" as being as rich as true white chocolate. For now, I will absolutely stick to making my own.

After this parade of near-complete disappointment, I was hoping for another semi- if not complete-success, so I tried the Milkless (milk chocolate) bar. It was so cloyingly sweet that until my palate cleared, it was vying for top spot in the list of failures. Kara seems to like it in small doses, 'though. Mind you, that means that my six-year-old finds it too sweet to finish.

So, yeah, these bars — across the board — suffer from being much too sweet and the more complex ones are afraid of using salt. Unless the formulations change, I'm unlikely to buy them again, which is a real shame, because I'd love little more than to give money to companies that cater to people with food allergies and sensitivities — especially those of the variety that I suffer from.

My favourite batch of homemade vegan cheese so far

It may not look like much, but I've got high praise for my latest batch of vegan mozzarella. It's based on Avocados and Ales' Mozzarella Aquafaba Cheese, with me subbing in sunflower seeds in place of the cashews and coconut yogurt (and 14 hours of fermentation) in place of the lactic acid. The result tastes distinctly of fresh mozzarella. The texture is a lot like my earlier experiments with vegan cheese, in that it's very gelatin-y (or agar-y, if one prefers).

I've yet to try melting this, but may just forgo such an attempt to make fried mozzarella sticks, instead.

Vegan Chick-Fil-A on homemade bao

Having never tried authentic Chick-Fil-A and recently experimenting with vegan cooking, my curiosity was piqued when I first encountered The Edgy Veg's Vegan Chick-Fil-A recipe. I used sesame oil in place of tahini in the seitan patties, omitted the liberal amounts of cayenne and chili powder she includes and used Whole New Mom's Egg Replacer recipe for that part of the binder.

I also made up a batch of bao to function as my buns.

My first two versions of this sandwich stayed fairly true to the original intent, sticking to toppings of pickles, homemade vegan cheese, vegan margarine and/or homemade navy bean spread. Yesterday, I decided to top them with just about every vegetable I had in the fridge and vastly preferred that version. I ran out of roasted red peppers on yesterday's venture and forgot to add the pickles, so today's bao were topped with bean spread, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, avocado and vegan Chick-Fil-A.

The breading is nicely seasoned and has a fantastic crunch. Really my only "issue" is that I found my seitan cutlets too thick. Now that I know I dislike having such thick patties, I can readily adjust next time.

Yum. Vegan brunch

This deliciousness was today's (late) breakfast. I oven-roasted some Ontario asparagus, paired it with my (work-in-progress) adaptation of vegan Hollandaise sauce (it's almost perfect), some rounds of vegan breakfast sausage I made over the weekend, and a vegan grilled cheese using homemade "mozzarella"

For the breakfast sausage, I omitted the thyme and added fennel seeds. Still, it could use a flavour-boost — I think I'll experiment with making a vegan chorizo.

But, yeah, this was a super-yummy breakfast. Tomorrow's variation will undoubtedly swap out asparagus for roasted sweet potato, as I've used up one and have been meaning to use the other for weeks. Should be stellar!