I have achieved the impossible!

You are looking at a vegan, gluten-free, refined-sugar-free, fudge-y, delicious brownie!

• 18 dates, soaked and drained
• 1 c. aseptically-packaged coconut milk (I think the stabilizers help with the texture of the brownie, so it's best to avoid the canned stuff for this recipe)
• 1 t. cider vinegar
• 2 t. vanilla
• ¼ c. coconut oil
• 2 T. ground flax seed
• pinch salt
• ¾ c. cocoa
• 1 c. all-purpose gluten-free flour blend
• ½ t. baking powder

Preheat oven to 350°. Add the cider vinegar to the coconut milk. In a food processor, blend the dates, adding the coconut milk mixture. Add the vanilla, coconut oil, flax seed and salt and blend again until smooth. If clumpy, sift the cocoa powder (I found I didn't need to follow this step). In a separate bowl, mix the dry ingredients together. Pour the dry ingredients into the food processor and blend briefly, taking care not to overmix. Pour/scrape the batter into a lightly-greased pan (I used a round cake pan) and bake for about 25 minutes -- this brownie should fail the "toothpick test".

These are excellent chilled!

Birthday pie!

Dad's birthday is on Sunday and we're celebrating by going out to a late lunch at our local sushi place tomorrow, followed by some homemade blueberry pie. I'm still perfecting the filling; this iteration uses a bag of frozen blueberries, about ½ cup of white sugar, the juice and zest of 1 lime and about ½ cup of flour. I've made this without flour — simply reducing the fruit mixture on the stove — and think I prefer that version.

Yesterday's pizza lunch

After dropping Kara off at school yesterday, I prepped a batch of my go-to pizza dough. When lunch rolled around, I pitted some black olives, chopped mushrooms, salami and an adaptation of Vegan Richa's mozzarella recipe. I think I'll do it again.

Homemade crackers

I've been adapting my go-to pie crust recipe to make crackers instead. They're a hit around here! Recipe to follow.

Recipe for homemade crackers

225g whole wheat flour

½ tsp. salt

115g cold fat (I used ~100g of bacon fat and the rest was vegan margarine for this batch)

ice water to moisten dough

salt in salt shaker

Mix the flour and salt together. Add fat to the flour mixture and, using fingertips, rub in fat, taking care not to melt the fat. Add ice water until the dough comes together. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and chill for at least ½ hour.

When dough has firmed up, preheat oven to 400°C, lightly flour a rolling pin and a Silpat or piece of parchment on your working surface. Roll the dough out thinly on the Silpat/parchment, adding flour as necessary to prevent sticking. Using a pizza cutter, cut the dough into cracker-sized pieces. Shake a modest amount of salt onto the unbaked crackers. Transfer the Silpat/parchment with the cut dough onto a baking sheet. Bake in preheated oven until the crackers are browned. Cool baking sheet on wire rack.

Makes 2 small batches.

We built a gingerbread house!

Despite the fact that this was made from a kit, this was a good amount of work. I don't know if we'll commit to making others in the future, but Kara and I had fun with this one. Now, if anyone has any suggestions as far as what to do with many panels of icing- and candy-coated gingerbread, I'm all ears.

Filed under, "Disappeared too quickly to be photographed"

I followed this recipe for Chinese Barbecued Pork from Epicurious and we — as a family — are in love. My only substitution was to use rice wine in place of the sherry/white wine. I also had to pilfer some 5 Spice from Bruce, as I was having difficulty finding it in our usual store. I was sure Bruce had provided me with a hand-ground blend; I'm definitely going to have to pick some of this stuff up. I tried it on some leftover pork cutlet first and found the marinade didn't permeate well. For this week's dinners, however, I used pork shoulder and found that the fat content made the pork incredibly juicy and moist, with most of the fat rendering out in the pan. At high enough heat, there's a pleasant smokiness, too.

F*** yeah, vegan cinnamon buns!

Based on Minimalist Baker's Easy Cinnamon Rolls recipe. Substitutions for my version are soy milk in place of almond milk, Fleischmann's Vegan Margarine in place of the vegan butter (this time, any way, I was all out of Earth Balance) and brown sugar in place of the granulated sugar in the cinnamon spread.I made a simple icing from icing sugar, soy milk and vanilla and poured it over top.

These were great! Vegan butter would've definitely worked better for the filling, but otherwise I can't complain. I will undoubtedly make them again.