Bacon Cake with Satay Ice Cream

I recently made a batch of Peanut Butter Chai Ice Cream from Let them eat vegan! I thought the mix was really tasty before it went in to the ice cream maker. Andy said it tasted a little bit like satay sauce, but we both liked it in frozen form.

It's creamy and rich and you just need a scoop to feel satisfied.

Then the other day I made a coconut cake. I got home at 7.30 at night, and had to have a cake made before I left for a research trip at 6 the next morning - you see, cake is an important data collection tool. So I was in a bit of a rush, and out of cocoa powder. I threw together the Coconut Heaven Cupcake recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance, in whole cake form - something I have done many times before. This time, though, I saw the coconut oil and thought it would be great. I let Andy lick the bowl as I put the cake in the oven, and he thought it tasted a bit.... bacon-y. I didn't want to admit it, but he was kind of right. The coconut oil gave the cake a strange aftertaste that really does taste a bit like bacon.

It wasn't overpowering or terribly unpleasant, so I brought the cake anyways, but had leftovers to bring home. To mask the bacon flavour a bit, we had a piece with ice cream.

Bacon cake with satay ice cream. Surprisingly delicious.

Meyer Lemon Sherbet

In Australia, sherbet is (correct me if I'm wrong) a fizzy powdered candy which I have never tried. In America, sherbet is pronounced like "sherbert" and means a fruity sorbet-style ice cream with a bit of milk in it. It's sort of halfway between ice cream and sorbet. Why it was given the name "sherbe[r]t" is beyond me.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine gave us a big bag of Meyer lemons from her tree. We used them to make lemon & sage burgers, added them to dal, and they appeared in other dishes, too, but we still had a bunch left to use. Andy suggested that we make sorbet. I decided to make it a sherbet, because hey, why not?

I googled some recipes, and then just ended up making my own recipe up as I went, tasting and making sense of things along the way. The end result was really extraordinarily delicious, if I can say that without sounding arrogant - tangy, sweet-tart, creamy, zesty, and refreshing.

Meyer Lemon Sherbet

4 meyer lemons (meyer are sweeter than other lemon varieties; if you don't have these, you may need to add more sugar to taste)
1 c. sugar
400 ml coconut cream
100 ml water
2 Tbsp. corn flour
2 Tbsp. water
1/4 tsp. tumeric (optional)

Carefully zest the lemons, avoiding the white pith. If you have a fancy zester, lucky you! Skip to the next step. If, like me, you use a peeler to get the zest, chop it up as finely as you can get it. Juice the lemons. I had 1 1/2 cups of lemon juice. If your lemons are smaller, maybe use another one, or else try it with less and see if you like the taste. You can always add more later.

In a saucepan, combine the coconut cream, 100ml of water, lemon zest and sugar. Heat over medium until the sugar dissolves. Add the lemon juice. Bring it up to just bubbling, taste it and add more sugar if it is too tart for your liking. Mix the corn flour with 2 Tbsp. of water and pour this into the sherbet mix. Stir it in very well, turn off the heat, and if you want your sherbet to be OMGSOYELLOW add some tumeric. Just a little bit won't make it taste like anything but lemons. Let the mixture cool to room temperature, and then chill it in the fridge until it is very cold.

Churn it in an ice cream maker until it has set. If you have no ice cream maker, try these instructions.

The three days of Christmas

This year, Andy and I continued some of our earlier Townsville Christmas traditions, which are beginning to cement themselves into place as proper traditions. Basically, we spread things out across Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day.

We have Christmas dinner on Christmas eve. We had, of course, a stuffed seitan roast with yuba skin. I had planned to cook this on the BBQ, so as to avoid heating up the house, but then Christmas eve was rainy and by dinner time it was a chilly 25 degrees, so into the oven it went! 

Christmas dinner, waiting to go in the oven.

The yuba didn't crisp up as much as usual, for some reason, but it was still good.

Along with the seitan roast, we had okra-corn bread stuffing (based on Susan V's recipe), mushrooms baked with garlic-parsley-butter, some (bought) cranberry jelly, and spinach. We topped the seitan with mango chutney, made that morning (which will get its own post soon). 

Tika got a veggie pig's ear, and Nacho had some pumpkin, one of her favourite treats. 

For dessert we had mango-fruit mince ice cream, made with the tropical fruit mince I also used for tarts.

Served up with little pastry bits, the baked scraps from when I made my tarts.

Christmas morning, Andy woke with the beginnings of a sinus infection or summer flu or something, so I cooked him up a nice breakfast and a hot lemon. For breakfast we had creamy mushrooms, spinach, and Vegg (another thing which will get its own post soon) with toast and tea. 

After brekky, we took Tika to the beach, where she chased plenty of sticks, ran around with a few other dogs, and ate too much salt water, making herself a bit sick as a result. 

Then it was back home for a cup of tea (for Andy), a mango-ginger-rum smoothie (for me), and some chocolate and white chocolate spiders, as we opened the gift(s) Andy's parents sent us. 

It was in pieces when we opened it, but a phone call cleared things up - it's a seedling tray, and a little thing for making seedling pots out of old newspaper.

For lunch, Andy cooked up some mushroom burgers with spinach and bacon bits and cranberry jelly.

Which we ate with salt and vinegar potato chips, another of our solidifying christmas traditions.

We spent the rest of the day doing not much - reading books, watching a movie, pulling some weeds in the garden, and drinking rosella cordial.

Our first harvest of rosellas was a small batch, so I only made a little cordial.

Then we ate leftovers for dinner, adding some more mushrooms and spinach to our leftovers, because Andy got a lot of both on Christmas Eve, reduced to clear!

Now all that's left is one piece of seitan, and some sweets. 

Our Boxing Day was pretty similar. For breakfast, we had mushrooms on toast, with spinach and Vegg.

And we spent the rest of the day eating fruit, chocolate spiders, and panadol (for poor sickly Andy). It wasn't the christmassiest christmas - in fact, it didn't really feel terribly christmassy at all. But it suits us - a christmas full of mushrooms, spinach and mangoes is a success, as far as we're concerned. 

Merry Christmas to everyone who celebrated it!

Book review: The New Scoop

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Alina Niemi, creator of the new vegan ice cream book The New Scoop: Recipes for Dairy-Free, Vegan Ice Cream in Unusual Flavors (Plus Some Old Favorites). She: would I like a copy to review? Me: Uh, yeah.

Actually, the conversation was a bit more nuanced than that. She explained that, coming from Hawaii, her ice cream recipes include lots of weird tropical fruits - which of course I love! Her ice cream recipes also didn't require the cooking method that we usually employ - and anything to make ice cream easier is something I am willing to try. She sent a PDF, and as it is starting to hot up here, the timing was perfect.

We've only tried two of the recipes, because we don't eat ice cream very fast, but I have so many more recipes flagged to try. What I love about this recipe book (I keep wanting to call it a cook book, but that doesn't really work here since there is no cooking) is:

• It is very comprehensive. The first 45 pages are just information about non-dairy ice creams, different types of frozen desserts, key ingredients, and how to actually freeze the mixture to turn it into ice cream (even without an ice cream maker). There are then 100 pages of ice cream recipes. Some use coconut milk, others use tofu, others  non-dairy milk. 
• The flavour varieties are diverse, and there are variations suggested for many f them. I am particularly keen to try Taro Ice Cream (when my taro plants are ready!), Beet-Balsamic Ice Cream, and Peanut Butter & Jelly Ice Cream.
• There is a chapter on yogurt making, followed by a chapter on making frozen yogurt. 
• There is a whole chapter on mochi! I have never actually eaten ice cream mochi, but the room temperature stuff seriously floats my boat. I haven't eaten any since we were in Hong Kong, which was over a year ago, and which is a serious problem. But it sounds not that horrible to make - the only obstacle is that The New Scoop recipe for mochi requires a microwave, which we don't have. However, this chapter has given me lots of ideas, and I will be googling non-microwave methods for making mochi. The chapter in this book has lots and lots of useful tips and information about making mochi, so even if I get a recipe from somewhere else I will be referring back.
• Omg the index! It is good. I get frustrated by some cookbooks because the index isn't very comprehensive, but this will not be one of those books.
• The recipes we've made so far have been yummy!

The first thing we tried was Pineapple Coconut Milk Ice Cream. Making it was much, much easier than cooking: just put pineapple, coconut milk, and sugar into a blender, then chill.

Then freeze. Then eat. It was so yummy, and so easy to make. My friend Belinda said it reminded her of the stuff she eats in Thailand. I thought the cooking was important to get the ice cream to be, you know, creamy... but this recipe totally proves me wrong.

The other recipe we tried was a tofu-based ice cream recipe. Tofu, soy milk, sugar and coffee were blended up together and then chilled and frozen. This ice cream was less creamy than our usual - not bad, but more like the Sanitarium brand stuff you buy in the store here. It also freezes harder. It is delicious, but Andy and I both prefer the coconut milk varieties. 

Apologies for the shonky iPod photo. Camera batteries are dead.

Basically, I prefer this ice cream book to the other one I have, Vegan Scoop. That one basically reproduces the same recipe with flavour variations throughout the book, which quite frankly I can work out for myself. We pretty much use that book for flavour inspiration. But The New Scoop suits us better because it uses actual fruit, flavours we love, and the recipes are a lot more varied. 

Summer is coming up so quickly here in Australia, so I would recommend getting your hands on a copy of this book! Northern hemisphere folks, there are some holiday-ish ice cream recipes, like Spiced Pumpkin, so it's worth a look for you, too, even though it's a bit wintery!

2012

Happy 2012, everyone!

They say what you do on New Year's Eve is what you'll be doing for the year ahead, and if that is the case, then Andy and I will be doing a lot of cooking, a lot of eating, a lot of reading, some movie-watching, and just a little bit of drinking.

Here are some of the things we ate, over the course of an afternoon and evening, on the last day of 2011.

Candy cane slice.


Crackers & Dip. I find champagne goes really well with sharp flavours, like this basil and olive dip.


We also had some cheese & crackers - smoked cheddar sheese, to be exact, which I received as part of a package swap with Susan (which I will post about soon).  This is really yummy, nicely textured vegan cheese.



I made sushi! It was my first time making it, and it really wasn't as daunting as I expected. My only tip is to have wet hands, so the sushi rice doesn't stick so much.  I made my sushi with brown rice, following the recipe from Celebrate Vegan by Dynise Balcavage, except filling it with zucchini and tofu.


The results were a bit bland, in both colour and flavour, and next time I will have zippier fillings. But, I can make sushi!


The best part of the night was easily when we ate ice cream sundaes. I bought some Soyatoo! Whipped Cream on my birthday, back in November. Because it was so freaking expensive, I wanted to use it on only the most perfect dessert. I decided, more than a month ago, that it had to be an ice cream sundae. But it was only this week that the right confluence of ingredients found themselves in our home. Some vanilla spice ice cream in the freezer.  Some Macho Fudge Sauce (from Urban Vegan by Dynise Balcavage) in the fridge. Some sprinkles in the pantry. And the result was everything I expected, and more. So, so good.



That wasn't all we cooked on New Year's Eve, though. We also made some preparations for breakfast the next morning.  I made these parsley breakfast sausages in the frying pan, because I couldn't be bothered steaming them.


And we made some tattie scones. These are essentially mashed potato flat breads, which we ate every day for breakfast in Scotland. And they are easy to make!


So with a bit of reheating, opening a tin, picking some spinach, and chopping some mushrooms (including this well-endowed specimen)...


We had our first meal of 2012.  It was good.


My "resolutions", if you want to call them that, are simple. I plan to wear gloves when I was dishes, to make my own laundry detergent, and to keep my Flickr account up to date. I'll add a brief promise for the next week or so to this: I will post a recipe for fig & pecan stuffing, and for mango granola, because Hannah has asked for them.  Remind me if I forget.

Black Sapotes are totes awesome.

Back in October 2007 I posted about the delicious tropical fruit, the Black Sapote.  At the risk of being repetitive, I'm going to do another post about this fab fruit -- it was nearly 4 years ago, and I have new things to say this time anyways! In October 2007, and for maybe a year or more, Andy and I were going through a phase where we bought them nearly every week.  Then, for some reason, we stopped buying them.  Until a few weeks ago, when I saw a basket of $1 sapotes at the market, and I said, "We're getting one".  Andy picked a big one, but then the stall-holder pulled out an even BIGGER one from the back of her truck.  So we bought two.

I put it next to a gift card, so you can see how big they are.

Black Sapotes are hard and green when you buy them.  You can't buy them much riper than this, because they are too delicate -- even picking them up can be tricky, so transporting them ain't gonna happen. Look at what happens to the bottom when they go ripe -- the weight of the fruit pushes down, and the bottom goes super flat.

Just ignore all the mess in the background.

You can slow the ripening process by putting firm sapotes in the fridge until a few days before you want them to ripen.  Then, once you bring them back to room temperature, they finish ripening and away you go.

The big one ripened much quicker than the littlie.

Black Sapote also makes a yummy port, so if you're ever in Far North Queensland you should treat yourself to a tasting at Shannonvale Tropical Fruit Winery.

Black Sapote is, as I said in 2007, also known as the Chocolate Pudding Fruit.  However, they don't really taste all that chocolatey.  If you think really hard about it, you can faintly taste a bit of chocolate, but that may just be imagined.  It's hard to say.  What they do taste like is yummy - sort of persimmony, which is unsurprising since the two fruits are in the same family.

So what things can you do with a Black Sapote?  This is what we've done recently...

1) In a pie. Scoop the flesh, separating out the seeds.  Mash or blend it up with a splash of Cointreau. 

Pour into a pre-baked Granola Nut Crust (the best recipe from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook, in my opinion).  Chill, and eat.

This was actually a bit of a fail, because I didn't mix anything, like agar, into the fruit to make it set.  So instead, I put it in the freezer.

2) In ice cream.  I made an easy-pants custard with coconut milk simmered with a cinnamon stick, and then a bit of corn flour.  Once it cooled, I blended in the flesh of a Black Sapote, took out the cinnamon, and churned it in the ice cream maker.  Cinnamon + Sapote = a super yummy flavour combo.

3) With a spoon.  Still the easiest, and possibly the best way to eat sapote -- straight up.

Have you ever tried a Black Sapote?  Were you convinced of their chocolate-likeness, or a skeptic like me?

Birthday Trifle

Andy had a birthday recently, so despite his comments that he didn't want anything, gifts or food or anything, I got him a present anyways.  I also wanted to make some kind of cake-like dessert, because what's a birthday if not a great excuse for cake?  However, we were only a few days away from a long weekend to Eden (where we've just returned from, so more on that soon), so we were trying to empty out the pantry and avoid grocery shopping.

This made birthday dessert-making tricky, because we were out of cocoa, out of chocolate, out of pastry, out of frozen fruit, and a few other things.  But I did notice a box of vegan jelly we bought at the Asian grocery store a few months ago.  I was going to make some jelly.  Then I though -- why not make trifle?

I settled on a simple but hopefully delicious vanilla bean-centric trifle to go along with our strawberry flavoured jelly.  First, I made a vanilla bean cake, turning the recipe for Vanilla Bean Cupcakes from Vegan Bake Sale into a big cake.  This didn't work all that well; for some reason the cake took twice as long as I expected to bake through.  And it had a few funny bubbles.  However, it was absolutely freaking delicious.

I make trifle by splitting my cake in half and spreading it with jam, before sandwiching it back together and cutting it into chunks.  Those chunks go into the trifle dish (in our house, a deep-ish pan) and jelly gets poured over the top to set amidst the cake chunks.  This goes against Andy's family's method, which involves setting the jelly separately, then breaking it up and putting on top of the cake that way.  But luckily he's flexible, and willing to try new things.

Once the jelly sets, some vegan custard goes over the top.

Then I sprinkled on some toasted coconut.

I was struggling to come up with a whipped cream alternative, based on what we had in the house.  But then it hit me - vanilla bean + coconut cream = Andy's favourite ice cream ever.  Since we had both of those things, I made some ice cream, which we scooped on top of each serve of trifle.

The result was really, very yummy.  The only thing this needed was a layer of real fruit.  But for a quickly thrown together, using what we had on hand kind of dessert, I was pretty impressed with myself.

Friday Night Dinner.

The end of a long week.  A friend is preparing to head to the Amazon for a year, so there are drinks to be had.  Come home at nearly 9pm, not drunk by any measure but just not that inspired to cook.  Check cupboards, fridge, and freezer.  Inspiration: crumpets.  With ice cream.

In this case, candy cane & choc chunk ice cream.

Being a grown up isn't so bad sometimes.

Happy Boxing Day

Andy and I aren't particularly attached to Christmas, especially in years like this one when we stay in Townsville with no family around.  But, we like any excuse to eat, and I like any excuse to cook elaborate meals, so we took Friday off from uni and cooked up two feasts: Christmas Eve Dinner, and Christmas Breakfast.

For dinner, we had a stuffed seitan roast with yuba skin (recipe to come in its own post soon);

 Saffron Potatoes, based on a recipe from Vegan Planet, which were only okay;

Sweet potato, Orange & Mango Salad, a tester recipe for Carla's One Dish Wonders;

Cranberry and Orange relish;

and little ramekins of Orange, Date & Almond Stuffing.

It was such a big meal that we didn't have room for dessert.

On Christmas morning we woke up to lots, and lots, and lots of rain, thanks to a sneaky category 1 cyclone that crossed the coast a few hours north of us.  It was the perfect morning for a hot cooked breakfast, and luckily I had done most of the work the day before.

I had pre-made a quiche that just needed warming up, filled with sausages, spinach & sundried tomatoes.

I made dough the night before for Noosa Morning Rolls, a tester recipe from One Dish Wonders, which are gently spiced ginger & macadamia rolls.  Really good on their own, or with leftover cranberry relish.

The only thing I had to make on the morning was Potato Latkes, following almost exactly a recipe from Bittersweet blog.  The only change I made was to use garlic chives instead of spring onions, and I was generous with oil, but my latkes totally burnt, and stuck.  They were edible, in a very crunchy way, and actually weren't too bad with tomato sauce.

For lunch, we took the easy way out - cocktails & potato chips.

After a phone call from Andy's mum, we churned some ice cream to make Chocolate Candy Cane Ice Cream Pie.

Then for dinner we had a little bit of everything that was leftover, along with some fresh spinach from the garden.

With still more leftovers to go, I'm looking forward to a day of grazing, but hoping that the rain clears for long enough today that we can go for a quick bike ride, or even just a walk!