Apple of my Thigh!

Here is my adaptation of the German Apple Cake recipe from the Joy of Vegan Baking (thanks little Ruth for getting this for my 20th last year, you're a superstar!) which has pages falling out of it all over the place from over-bending (I don't know if I actually use this book a lot but it is REALLY GOOD and I read it so much when I first got it, like bedtime reading for a couple of months kinda crazily) and this recipe actually fell into my mixing bowl when I opened the book! What a sign!!! I adapted it for the sake of flours and such, and what I had available and how I felt about the flavour of the batter and stuff.

It turned out marvelously and as it ended up being the only cake at Katrina's Housewarming Pot Luck, it shined for everyone.

German Apple Cake (adapted from The Joy of Vegan Baking by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau) my adaptations are asterixed

PREHEAT YR OVEN TO 180c.
GREASE A CIRCULAR TIN
SPRINKLE IT WITH BROWN SUGAR AND CINNAMON (TO TASTE)*

3 apples, peeled and cut into thin slices.
1/2 c. non dairy margarine.
1/2 c. raw sugar
3 T. rice milk*
1/2 c. applesauce (I used a bit more than this because I had a little bit left in the jar and didn't wanna waste)
1 t. natural vanilla essence*
1.5 t. maple syrup *
1/2 t. cinnamon*
1/3 c. buckwheat flour*
1/3 c. chickpea flour*
1/3 c. white maize flour*
1/2 c. generic gluten free "plain" flour mix* (THATS ONE AND A HALF CUPS OF FLOUR)
2.5 t. baking powder

topping: 1/4 c. brown sugar, 1/2 t. cinnamon, 1/4 t. cardamom* mixed.

depending on how you slice your apples you should have enough for both the top and the bottom of the cake. line the bottom of the cake (after you've sugared it) tin with some apples, try to get them in a nice arrangement because this will be the top of the cake. put the remaining apples to the side to do something similar after you've poured the batter in.

Cream the margarine and sugar either by hand or with an electric hand mixer. Add the apple sauce, milk, vanilla essence. Add the flours and baking powder and stir until just combined. Pour onto the apples, and tap the tin a bit to make sure all the apples are covered and there are no gaps or air bubbles.

Arrange the remaining apples to the top of the cake, hopefully you'll be able to cover the whole thing. sprinkle with the sugar spice mix heavily and bake for about 35 minutes.

The cake is done when an inserted toothpick comes out clean and the top is crisp and brown. let it cool for at least 15 minutes before putting a plate on top of it and turning it upside down. the bottom (now top) apples should be soft and sweet smelling.

I think this is sort of what I imagine a 'tea cake' is like. It had a really lovely crumb, a moist top and crisp bottom, almost like a pie-cake. Will make again. yay. Hopefully next time I'll get to have some whilst it's still warm, with vanilla ice cream (we did serve it with ice cream, which was a star of an accompaniment brought by the extra lovely Lizzie!) for more homely-ness.

nb: i just realised how yellow toned my pictures are! my computer must have a red bias in its screen! aaaah. sorry for the acid trip, guyz.

Taro Taro Taro

I'm not going to make excuses for not blogging.

Alex and Damian celebrated their birthdays at Coogee beach and I made a couple of offerings, one being a baked tofu cheesecake, and the other a HIGHLY experimental Taro Banana Coconut cake with Raw frosting (the cake was sugar fest. an absolute sugar fest).
Other food-gifts were vegan Honeycomb made by Kathy, a tofu and asparagus Toss by Louise and Alex made a soba noodle salad. Delcious.

Louise once said she was going to have an "extreme pot luck" where guests would be invited to cometo dinner and bring a dish that used either unconventional ingredients or methods or otherwise seemed kind of pointless. (Her example was a savory 'jellybean pie').
This cake may not be unconventional (it is based off of a Hawaiian recipe list I found whilst trying to figure out what to do with the taro) it was unexpected.
Flour free, lots of waiting for our frozen taro to get to mashing state, not sure whether or not we were cooking it right, also mentioning the idea of the cake to a few people tweaked some "huh?? wtf?" reactions to the concept.

Conceptual cake. Woah. Think about it. Cake concepts. Cake, as a concept. Fuck. Heavy.

Taro-Banana Coconut Cake

• 2 cups. hot peeled and cooked mashed taro
  (we used two pieces of frozen fresh taro that alex got from a asian supermarket. these took a while to cook until mashing state - its ready when kind of purpley)
• 2 bananas, mashed
• 1/4 cup melted nondairy margarine
• 1/4 tsp. each ground nutmeg and cinnamon
• 1 cup dessicated/shredded coconut
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 cup nondairy milk
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract

Grease a shallow cake pan (we used a loaf tin, but this would make a lovely round cake. it may help to put this off until you've completed making the batter so you know what sort of volume you're dealing with. this cake doesnt rise, so if it's shallow it'll cook more thoroughly. i feel that the loaf tine depth was why we had a very moist cake, which we enjoyed a lot).
Preheat the oven to 180c (350f i think!).
Combine the hot taro with the melted margarine, mashing again as you work the two into each other.
Add the coconut, bananas and sugar, mix in well.
Then the cinnamon, nutmeg, milk and vanilla, beat all together for about a minute. We may have done a better job if we used an electric mixer but we don't have one Also it was 1am.
Pour into cake pan and bake for 45 minutes to an hour (or until firm).

I made a Raw "whipped cream" icing (my first time using a piping bag. didn't win) using the cream section of this recipe.
I have a lot of opinions about the whole 'raw-food' thing, so I got scoffed at by Louise and Al when making this recipe because I've had a history of scoffing at raw food (well. not the food, but diet. I am scared of cults) but as I used maple syrup not honey (for true-to-vegan purity) it became a cooked food because maple syrup is not raw!! Yay, I win, etc.
Fucking delicious, by the way. Made for good ice cream when kept in the freezer, or like a yoghurt with cereal the next day. Whee.

The post-digestion swim in Coogee was amazing and we did some great explorations into the rockpools, hanging out with hermit crabs, bigger crabs, molluscs and tiny fish.

POST SCRIPT: Pip keeps getting me to mention if the recipe is any good, because apparently the inclusion into my blag doesn't actually promise that it is a good recipe and you should try it.
THIS IS. Also, you'll note that my blagging is very sporadic and this is generally because I can't be bothered writing a recipe out for something I only kind-of enjoyed eating.
I enjoyed this cake, Alex enjoyed this cake, everyone at the potfuck enjoyed this cake (albiet, not as intensely was the enjoyment as my tofu cheesecake, but still, people did surprise faces and happy faces for this cake).
ALSO: I have no plan on sticking the "air-humping" tag onto just any ol' recipe, willy-nilly.
NILLY.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxox

Festivus Bird.

Or: FUCK YOU MOTHER FUCKAZ I GOT 2xTOFURKEY WITHIN 3 DAYS OF EACHOTHER AND Y'ALL IS JUST JEALOUSES.
Or: I shouldn't write food-blog posts whilst thinking about listening to Wu-Tang Clan because the echo-effect of being hip hop isn't actually as reflective of bringing the mother-fucking ruckus (ain't nuttin to fuck with, etcetera).

Tofurkey of the Festive Season #1:
Prepared quite hastily (well, considering that it is a recipe that requires resting over night, i did it pretty chaotically) for Fjorn's birthday pot luck (other contributions to the luck included: olive loaf and coffee scrolls - from Ruth, a curry yum from Sam, salad by Tim and Fjorn herself provided some delicious chickpea stuffed mushrooms from the grill!) - to the stuffing I added cranberries for festive charm or some shit. Mostly because I had intened to probide a cranberry sauce but napping happened instead.
Fjorn's birthday is the 24th of December which makes her Jesus' totally cooler and more-legit twin. The pot luck was on the traditionally (like, according precisely to the episode of Seinfeld that it comes from - information I collected from WIKIPEDIA, TELLER OF TRUTHS) celebrated date of Festivus. For the rest of us.


Tofurkey of the festive season #2:
At Mgtvle, the warehouse my partner and friends live in - in Sydney. Alex had bared witness and ploayed an integral part to the creating of the tofurkey we celebrated winter in Anglesea with in July and had prepared the 'tofu mold' for this bird before I got to Sydney to help finish it off with stuffing, basting, etcetera.
I have little doubt that we're going to make this roast a off the cuff thing tradtion very soon considering I only checked the recipe for cooking times and how to make the cornbread (which I pretty much disregarded in both cases) for stuffing.
Despite being a quite involved, messy and slow cooking recipe, it has become really easy for this to be made based purely on instinct and taste. I realise whilst writing thist post that this was roasted 1 year exactly from the day I first roasted this kind of tofurkey. December 26th, the day of boxes.
We charred it a little on the skin - this bird has a crispy beancurd 'skin' that was marinated and thrown over the top of the roasting tofu halfway through it's time in the oven- because we got a little distracted and excited about the deep frying machine that has recently surfaced at Mgtvle. I have no shame in this fact: I HAVE WANTED TO HAVE A DEEP FRYING MACHINE SINCE I WAS 15 YEARS OLD. Now, I am pretty young, so this is only 5 years ago but still. I am so excited and bouncy.
It's a bit tricky to decide how to slice and transfer the bird from dish to plate elegantly. Here served with sweet potato chips (deep fried). The alterations to the stuffing were carrots in place of celery, and the addition of flat beer with the stock.
Another difference between these two birds were the variables of herbs and stock put into the tofu mould, the kind firm tofu used in either (I can't tell you what Alex used because I wasn't there. I know he didn't have "chicken" stock and that his tofu felt different to the stuff I used on the 23rd) also that Alex left the bird in the mold in the refrigerater for at least 48 hours longer than I did (I only had mine in over one night) which I think spoke for much in terms of what kind of texture we got from the bird.

It took me forever to re-surface the link from which I first decided to make this kind of tofurkey over a year ago, but I found it originally from, and adapted it from here: at What Do I Know? by Kathy - who adapted her recipe from a popular one at VegWeb. I made the bean curd skin from inspiration taken from Bryanna Clark Grogan and what I did was basically just get a sheet of dry bean curd skin, soak it in a watered-down warm version of the marinade we gave to the rest of the bird and wrapped the top of the tofu-lump with it after it had been in the oven for a little over half it's roasting time.

I really wish I'd taken photos of the FUCKING LOVELY Apple & Strawberry custard crumble Alex made for me (with a short crust base that blows my gluten-freed mind) as well as the Veganomicon feast that Louise made for a bunch of us on Christmas Day as well.

Louise made for desert following the bird, a cake based on the Brooklyn/Boston cream pie cupcakes from VCTOW using wheat flour that I should not have partaken of. hehe.

BackTrack : Pip's Birthday Cake.

The wonderpuss, miss Phlippila celebrated her birthday in (gluttonous!) style through food in September. She hosted a potfuck which you can read about on her blog. I am going to now talk about the cake I made for Pips.

I have to say at the outset that because of the use of Stout (coopers. my favourite) in the cake batter, it isn't really 100% gluten free, but I made it okay for myself by just putting lots of booze in it and in my belly anyway so I was due to suffer from -something- that night, in any case. Wheee!

I've finally gotten around to looking at the photos my housemate, Riva let me take using her camera, so I can blog with pictures about food. like it's actually a food blog, for reals.

I used this recipe from Susie's Parsnip Parsimony. Which is a blog I love and adore and wish she would get bloggin' again because I feel like I'm for-real really learning when I read her blog. And she does cute things and is a big science nerd. A few things went wrong in the making of this cake so it only ended up as two-tiere and I didnt want to waste the icing if I fucked up with my piping bag (I don't know how to use it, ok. i use a spatula. that'll do) but it was all my fault, and not Susie's. Susie can do no wrong. Science can do no wrong. Well. That last sentence, maybe.

Things that went wrong (from my memory, this feels like ages ago!):

• I bought a really delicious looking raspberry jam to use, that came in a big jar so I could still have some for myself to do private-things with (like, put it on rice and gross stuff like that which I do when noone's looking), hehe, and would make a good storage jar after I was done with the jam. My sister called me whilst I was on the tram to the bus that I take to get home (I travel an hour each way between my house and work, three times a week, lots of room for conversation) and as I walked from the tram to the bus, the jam jar kamikaze'd itself infront of the bus. I cut up my hand a fair bit cleaning up the mess, and missed the bus. Damn distracting family exploits! bah! So I had to buy cheaper smaller jars of raspberry jam the following day, for a less friendly price.
• I am absolutely USELESS with our oven in this flat. It is electric, and I think it tells me lies. and the oven thermometer confuses me. and I just can't bake like I used to. so the first layer was slightly burnt. and then collapsed a little. so I couldn't split the damn thing and make the ultimate decadance of cake-piss-ups for the Pips.
• WTF would I get liquid lecithin drops for? I settled for lecithin granules, and they seemed to do the job? I don't know why I needed them, but they didn't ruin anything so Its okay.

I replaced the flour with a standard general-mix of Gluten Free Flour, from a supermarket. For the icing I used Bacardi and I found a vegan vanilla pudding mix at Rishon's in Balaclava. Ummmm.... I also melted down some lindt chocolate and mixed in coffee essence, because the Pip loves coffee.

When the cake collapsed, it left this chunk crumb. I put the filling, some chocolate and some icing and a raspberry on it to serve to Riva as she had international guests staying with her and couldn't attend the potfuck. The mini-cake was much more photogenic and adorable than the mama-cake, but man did the mama-cake work a treat with booze.

x x