Chocolate Coffee Crunch Cake

As part of my long-standing family tradition, I honor all requests for birthday cakes to the letter. When I was growing up, my mom would make every member of my nuclear family (there weren't all that many of us) whatever kind of cake we wanted...from scratch. The scratch part is important because the rest of the year it was all cake mixes and pre-packaged sorts of deals. I don't mean to talk smack about the whole pre-fabricated cake phenomenon. Now that I'm all grown up and just a bit handy in the kitchen, it strikes me that those boxes really save very little work. Like I told my sister a while ago, if you have flour, sugar, oil, baking soda/powder, water, and vanilla, you have a cake. Obviously some cakes are more complicated, but the basic principle holds. I suppose the mixes save a bit of time and measuring, but that's about it. I tend to prefer the greater flexibility and options involved with the little extra effort of baking from scratch, especially since basic recipes--like the one I made for C's birthday this year--are so completely simple. Though I may be personally leaning toward pie (in the epic struggle between pie and cake), birthday cakes are really one of my absolutely favorite things to bake. 

This cake, which we tentatively dubbed the Chocolate Coffee Crunch Cake, was dreamed up by a pair of vegan piggies as we engaged in a bit of brainstorming to come up with the perfect idea for a cake to celebrate his 32nd birthday. The chocolate was kind of inevitable. What IS IT  with people and chocolate cake? I am positively giddy on the rare occasions when people request Cherry Cake (like my sister) and Strawberry Cake (like our friend Lizz). I doubled the recipe for basic chocolate cake from VCTOtW and flavored the basic buttercream recipe with coffee extract. This cake really hinged, though, on the toffee. Though I have long gazed fondly from the sidelines, I haven't ventured much into the field of candy-making. This was the first recipe I've ever made where I didn't feel comfortable shrugging off the direction to heat to some specific temperature. Candy making seems to be all about precision, so I gleefully selected a candy thermometer and set to work. Thanks to the pioneering work and self-sacrifice of The Vegan Table, toffee is a confectionery delight that is well within an enterprising vegan's reach. That deceptively simple recipe, and the whole fabulous blog, can be found here.

Souley Vegan Wants to Kill Me

And I'm really not complaining. I can think of many many ways to die that would be worse than asphyxiating under a pile of southern fried tofu and potato salad. So can you, I imagine. These photos are from our second trip to this haven of greasy fried goodness in its unassuming Oakland location. I always worry when I visit a great restaurant for the second time that my good experience won't be replicated. In this instance, I particularly had some niggling--and totally unwarranted, as it turns out--doubts about my memory of what I had been proclaiming near and far to be the best potato salad in the world.

Barbecued tofu with potato salad

Southern fried tofu, collards, and potato salad

Southern fried tofu, biscuit and gravy, potato salad, peas.

Souley Vegan treats customers to a very laid back atmosphere. You walk in, order your food from the very nice lady at the front counter, pay, and then wait for your food to brought to you. The inside of the place is sunny and clean, and food is ordered by the item. Basically, you can get one item for $6 and pay $2 for each additional item. If you're an unapologetic newbie and want to try a little of everything, you can get a heaping sampler platter of just about every dish for $19 to which you can add red beans and rice and pile of fried okra for an additional $6. We went that way the first time we ate at Souley Vegan, but this time we were much more focused in our attentions. C ordered some okra to split with Matt, and they got it all to themselves because Diana and I don't have much to do with the stuff. Slimy, folks. Slimy. C also ordered the barbecued tofu, which comes smothered in an earthy, darkly sweet sauce. Matt, Diana, and I all opted for the southern fried tofu, a starchy-proteiny offering that the menu describes as better than fried catfish. I love me some fake fish, dear reader, and while this particular tofu isn't doing much in the way of trying to taste fishy, it is delicious. Imagine thick, marinated slabs of tender tofu generously breaded in a delectable, peppery cornmeal crust. The only item that I was not so impressed by was the biscuit and gravy that Matt ordered. The truth about this may well be that I'm a biscuit snob (add it to the list of ways in which my nose is permanently in the air), but I found the texture too cakey for my taste. I think a biscuit should be dense and flaky, and this was like a slightly savory muffin. Tasty, but not biscuity.

 We all got the potato salad, and Matt ordered black-eyed peas while Diana and I both picked the sauteed collards. And have I mentioned how amazing the potato salad is? Because it is. Amazing. Tangy and creamy, but not overly saucy. In general I'm underwhelmed by potato salad, and as I've stated, would generally rather save my carbs for sweets and liquor. This absolutely does not apply to the potato salad at Souley Vegan. It's a damned good thing I don't live in Oakland.

"Meat" Balls

I experiment with faux meat, dear readers, so that you don't have to. I wouldn't go so far as to call my experimenting selfless, but you may do so if you think it's appropriate. I could hardly stop you. As I think you've gleaned over the last year of my bloggage, C and I are not big pasta eaters. Personally, I prefer to save my carb calories for sugar: fermented or otherwise. I'll skip the linguini, but please pass the beer and the truffles! I'll forego the fusilli, but don't withhold the martinis and chocolate mousse. You can see where I'm going with this, right? On occasion, though, I want to eat something that I can twirl up with my fork. Something slathered in a tangy, chunky marinara. Something piled with "meat" balls. Just as I discovered--after going vegan--that the main draw of my once beloved caprese salad was actually the salted fresh tomatoes with basil (and not, in fact, the fresh mozzarella), I more than enjoy a plate of spaghetti and meatballs without the spaghetti (and, obviously, without the meat). I swap the pasta out with the much-maligned spaghetti squash (so easy, so quick, so good for you!), and the meatballs with "meat" balls.

Before experimenting with the recipe I'm including in this post, I had restricted myself out of laziness to the Veganomicon recipe for beanballs. While I still like these and find them both savory and quite palatable, they never really scratched my itch for "meat" balls. Isa and Terry came up with something very special in their now famous chickpea cutlets, but I just don't think the formula extends well to a mock-up of those savory balls of beefy death that people enjoy with their pasta. Though vegandad has a meatball recipe that uses tempeh,and I'm interested in trying it, I've recently had great success in making some adaptations from the recipe in the New Farm Cookbook. Since I picked up an extra big spaghetti squash, we had ample "pasta" for two nights. Each recipe makes 36 balls, but because C and I are such piggies for protein, we pretty much made our way through an entire batch each night. If you feel nauseous thinking about it, you are most certainly not alone. We DID have leftovers, though, so let that mitigate your derision, however slightly. The main reason I made these twice, though, is because I thought the seasoning in the original recipe was wildly insufficient. The second night, we amped it up a bit, and I'm posting the recipe with my changes. These are super fast to make and quite tasty, as all fried things are.

2 c dry tvp
1 cube beef-style broth
1 3/4 c boiling water
1 small onion
3 T olive oil
2 T Braggs
2 T oregano
black pepper
1 t garlic powder
1/2 c whole wheat flour
oil for frying--I used canola

Dissolve broth cube in boiling water. Pour over the tvp and stir briefly. Allow to rest for 10 minutes to rehydrate. Meanwhile, dice and saute the onion in the olive oil. When the onion is translucent, stir in the herbs and garlic, drizzle with Braggs, and cook a few minutes more. Stir onion and flour into soaked tvp. Stir rigorously for a minute or so to develop the gluten. Form into 1 inch balls and fry until brown.

Incidentally, I realize that this post represents a betrayal of my pledge to my squash-hating readers to refrain from posting about two squash dishes in a row. I apologize for this and suggest that you selectively edit to make this post less offensive. Every time you see the word "squash" simply substitute it in your brain with something else, like "sunshine" or "pumpernickel." If it works for the great masterpieces of canonical American fiction, why not my humble food blog?

Baked Squash Stuffed with Brown Rice, Cashews, and Mushrooms

We've talked about this, right? If you've not already started taking serious advantage of the heaps of succulent winter squashes piled in and around your local natural foods store, then I have to infer that you haven't been paying attention. Or that you live in a winter-squash-free zone. Wait. Are there winter-squash-free zones? I hope not. *shudder* Or that you share my beloved sister's unfortunate aversion for all things gourd-like and answering to the name that rhymes with "quash." To her, and those of her ilk, I apologize for this blog entry. It is not for you, gentle squash-haters. And to you I promise that my next blog post will be, like those fictive (I hope) zones I worried about above, entirely squash free.

For my part, I can't resist them. It is always with a bit of sadness that Spring finds me lingering a little mournfully in front of the steadily dwindling piles of winter squash. Maybe the kabochas vanish first, then the red curry, the carnivale, the turban, the hubbard, the delicatta, the acorn (Actually, the acorn can leave whenever it wants. I can't abide by a squash that I'd rather die than peel. Have you seen those things?). Finally, we're left with a small collection of anemic, watery spaghetti squash that aren't worth buying. But there's enough time to mourn what hasn't yet come to pass for the year, now we should eat squash!

The following recipe is a successful version of a stuffed, baked squash that I attempted last winter. On that occasion, I underestimated the needed liquid levels and the baking time, and let me just say that it was...unsuccessful. C, bless his heart, claims not to remember it. But I do. This time it turned out the perfect combination of savory stuffing, meaty mushrooms, toothsome cashews, and sweet squash flesh. I used a baby hubbard, but I think you could use any of the hard skinned varieties. Really, this recipe is more method than anything else. I'll definitely be making something similar before that bittersweet and inevitable day arrives, heralding the arrival of strawberries and the departure of the winter squash.



Baked Squash Stuffed with Brown Rice, Cashews, and Mushrooms

1 medium winter squash

Slice a thin disk off the bottom of the squash to give it a base. This prevents it from rolling around on your baking sheet. Cut the top off, much as you would a jack-o-lantern. You want a large enough hole to easily clean and stuff the squash. Clean out the seeds and stringy fibers and set aside.

1 c uncooked short grain brown rice
2 t unchicken broth paste (or 1 cube)
2 c water

In a small saucepan, combine all ingredients. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low. Simmer for 45-50 minutes until the rice is cooked. While it's cooking, make the rest of the stuffing.

1 medium yellow onion
2 c (about 1/2 lb) sliced crimini mushrooms
oregano
sea salt
black pepper
1 c raw cashews

Saute onion until translucent. Add mushrooms and cook until soft. Season as desired, then remove from heat. When the rice is done, add it to the mushrooms, along with the cashews, and stir well.

Preheat oven to 400. Spoon filling into squash, pressing down with your spoon to pack it. Replace the top of the squash and bake for about an hour. The squash is done when a fork can easily pierce the outside shell. A word of caution: Overcooked squash is by far preferable to undercooked. So when in doubt, give it ten more minutes.

Dirt Cake and Marzipan Mushrooms

This is a blog of heartbreak, dear readers. That is, I had my vegan heart set on making a buche de noel for my friend Diana's Christmas Eve party. And I had that heart broken. For those of you who are not so much in the know on these things, a buche de noel is also known as a yule log. Basically you make a swiss roll cake, then frost and decorate it to look ~kind of~ like a log. Cocoa sprinkles and powdered sugar stand in for "dirt from nature" as one amusing ehow video suggested and snow, obviously. It is also somewhat traditional to create a bark-like effect by dragging a fork along the frosted log, and to festoon the log with marzipan (or meringue, for the chicken ovum-inclined) mushrooms. Inevitably, I got cocky. I thought I had this yule log thing on lock-down. I dropped hints about it on facebook. I trumpeted about it to my friends via text message and on the phone. I was so confident that I was going to be able to pull it off seamlessly that I didn't leave myself all that much time to correct/revise/reverse direction altogether.

Then two things went wrong. First, the coconut whipped cream with crushed peppermint sticks was too thin. This part was my fault. I didn't allow adequate time for the cans of coconut milk to chill in the fridge, and apparently the store had had a run on them recently so the ones I bought were too recently manhandled in a warehouse somewhere. Because of this, the fat was insufficiently separated from the more liquidy part of the milk. Because of this, the coconut milk was too runny. And because of this, the coconut whipped cream was too runny. You're seeing the pattern here, right? I honestly think I could have worked with a too runny filling, though, if only the cake, which had rolled up perfectly and without incident when it was fresh out of the oven, hadn't cracked all the way through in three places when I unrolled it. There I was, dear reader, standing in my kitchen wearing my fabulous black Secret Society of Vegans apron, with my chilled bowl of runny, but decidedly delicious, coconut whipped cream ready by my side. As I gently unrolled the cake, using the utmost care, the damn thing cracked. My shrieks of disappointed horror could probably be heard in three counties. In desperation and denial, I attempted to fill the cracked thing anyway, only to have it crack even worse when I rolled it back up again. Furious, now, I threw the whole thing in the fridge and faced my beloved partner, C, who was standing gingerly by to absorb the tears or fists that inevitably result from such a thwarting at the hands of the baking gods.

While I was initially infuriated by C's suggestion that I make another cake, I soon calmed down and saw the wisdom in this proposal. I quickly whipped together a double batch of the basic chocolate cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and baked it into a layer cake. This I frosted with chocolate buttercream and some of the now delightfully glaze-like coconut whipped cream. I topped the cake with adorable marzipan mushrooms. Seriously, can those things be any cuter? I left the sides of the cake bare, which rather worked because it was my de facto buche de noel...just without the log part. I instead thought of it fondly as a dirt cake, and I enjoined the party goers who received it to imagine that it was, in fact, rolled in some meaningful way. So I guess this is after all a sort of meaningful holiday story of thwarting, sadness, anger, and redemption. I really wanted a buche de noel, but what I got instead was a dirt cake. Luckily I--and my friends--really like dirt. Now somebody please please please give me another excuse to mold things out of marzipan, because I may have a new addiction.

Daring Bakers December Challenge

You probably didn't notice (or did you?), but I skipped a month of Daring Bakers Challenges. With family visiting and Thanksgiving to plan, I just couldn't wrap my head around it. But I'm back! The December challenge was relatively easy, fun to make, and delicious: Christmas Stollen. Basically, this is a yeasted sweet bread, filled with candied fruit and dusted with powdered sugar. The host for this month's challenge, Penny from Sweet Sadie's Baking, explained in the notes that the loaf is traditionally shaped to represent the baby Jesus, though her directions specify a wreath shape. I would have been a little creeped out to hack into and eat something shaped like a baby. But maybe that's just me.

The stollen was delicious. So much so that I was relieved to be able to take it to a holiday party to which C and I were invited. How better to dispose of a delicious sweet bread loaf of 10-12 servings than to take it to a party and foist it on other people? Otherwise, C and I would likely have stayed home with it for days, shaving off thin slices repeatedly and trying to convince ourselves that we had not eaten enough to qualify as a serving, even as the loaf steadily dwindles and disappears. It would have been ugly. I might have stopped going to the gym, and become to altogether disoriented from the constant influx of sugar and white flour that my senses might have gone completely out of whack. I might have started gargling with olive oil and brushing my teeth with marzipan. I might have required an intervention that wouldn't come because C would have been collapsed under a pile of stale cookies with his cell phone just out of reach. I'm not going to lie to you, dear readers. Our lives are hard.

Anyway, though it looks pretty fussy, this loaf was pretty easy to make. The only extra step involved candying citrus peel. Because why buy pre-made citrus peel when it's quite easy to candy your own? I had already done something close to this when I made the orange marmelade for my first ever Daring Bakers challenge. Luckily, that stuff lasts forever. I'm just a tad ashamed to admit it, but I think we might have a small jar of it kicking around the fridge. Basically, you slice the orange peel, blanch it three times, and then cook it in syrup until the peel absorbs all the sugar. Then you roll it in powdered sugar and let it dry. This candied peel is then chopped and added to the buttery dough along with rum-soaked dried fruit (I used cherries). Once the dough is assembled, it hangs in the fridge for up to a week (I let it go three days) before shaping, final proofing, and baking.

Now that I've had it, I can see why this sort of thing makes such excellent Christmas gifts. The stollen is sweet, tender, and flaky, but also quite sturdy. It apparently ships well as the post-baking bastings of butter (well, vegan margarine) and sugar act as a kind of preservative. If you're a fan of sweet breads and have time to make your own, please consider forgoing the inevitable holiday panettone and try this instead. Seriously, bread in a box at the grocery store? What's that about? Incidentally, if you are now fired by the passion of a thousand suns and just know that you have to make your own stollen like right. freaking. now, send me a message or email me and I'll give you the vegan lowdown for enterprising stollen bakers. It is well worth the effort.

Roasted Carrot Soup

Last week I had a sudden, intensely strong craving for borscht. I am not, in general, a huge beet fan, but I absolutely love a bowl of borscht. The earthiness of the beets mixes with the mild sweetness of the carrots and cooks up into a kind of buttery tasting soup that still manages to seem very...clean, for lack of a better word. Admittedly, the soup's vibrant redness and capacity for staining things makes it a bit dangerous. If you have to spill some soup on your favorite pajamas (doesn't everyone eat dinner in pajamas?), you don't want that soup to be borscht. All the same, though, that level of danger makes eating it just a little bit more special.

After that lovely stuff was all gone, though, we I wanted to go with something a bit safer. What's safer than carrots? I realize that the world is littered with carrot soup recipes, many of which lean heavily on a variety of fat sources to thicken and enrich them. Since I am personally not a fan of soups with a really heavy mouth-feel, I opted to use just a bit of cashews to give it that slight, cream-based feeling. My other main contribution is roasting the carrots instead of just cooking them in the broth or with the onions. I've been a bit single-minded about roasting recently. Seriously, there aren't many things I can be talked out of drizzling with a bit of olive oil and baking in the oven. Also, the garlic roasts along with the carrots, and very few things in this world are more delicious than roasted garlic. Or it may just be that there are very few things in the world about which I will resist the temptation to speak in hyperbole.

All joking aside, this is the time of year to make root vegetable soups. Right now the squashes, beets, and carrots are bursting from the produce shelves in all their winter abundance (which, incidentally, also means that they're at their cheapest), but don't be lulled into complacency. The season will be over sooner than you think.

Roasted Carrot Soup

1/3 c raw cashews, soaked for three or four hours
5-6 medium-sized carrots, thickly sliced
4 cloves garlic, sliced or chopped
sea salt
1 small sweet onion
1/2 t turmeric
1 T rubbed powdered sage
3 cubes veggie broth
6 c water
1 mandarin orange

Preheat oven to 375. On a baking sheet, toss carrots and garlic with a little olive oil. Sprinkle with salt. Roast for 30 minutes or until tender, stirring at least once. While the carrots are roasting, heat a little more oil in a large pot. Add onions and cook until translucent. Add turmeric and sage and cook 3 minutes more. Add 3 cubes of broth and 6 cups of water (or just 6 cups of veggie broth. You can figure that out right?) and reduce heat to low. When the carrots are tendered and starting to look a bit caramelized, remove from oven. Process carrots, garlic, cashews, and about a cup of the broth/onion mixture until smooth. Add more broth as necessary. Return the soup to the pot and cook on low for 10-15 minutes to let the flavors mingle. Squeeze the juice from the orange into the soup, stir briefly, and serve topped with roasted pepitas. Some of the onion chunks will still be in the soup, but we like it that way.