Yay!!!! Vegan Cupcakes book has arrived!!!!

Okay, so I've been v. naughty and been neglecting my blog (but let's face it - who's actually reading this thing?)....

Anyway, I just thought I'd share with the world that my copy of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World (WCTOTW) has arrived!!! I just wish it had arrived BEFORE my birthday (yesterday) so I could have made tasty cupcakes for myself (I'm shaking my fist at you Amazon.com!!!).

I've bought myself a pasta maker (so much fun) and I made ravioli and Malaysian dumplings on the weekend - pics to arrive soon.

Anyway, I FINALLY HAVE THE CUPCAKE COOKBOOK TO END ALL CUPCAKE COOKBOOKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Iron Chef Vegan (Amy)

Mum's Sugar Cookies

My mum was quite the baker when I was a kid, but I don't think she ever made chocolate covered Valentine's day sugar cookies! These are on p182 of The Garden of Vegan. I have to say, that Sarah Kramer does a good cookie recipe (my friends will recognize my penchant for the cookie baking).

Hopefully these cookies will make my tasty (vegan) boyfriend fall head over heels tomorrow! That's if he isn't playing Zelda on our new Nintendo Wii - or if I'm not wrestling the controller out of his hands for my go!!!

Homestyle Chocolate Chip Cookies

These are SOOOOOO good!!!

The fantastic mix of maple syrup with molasses is genius!!

My copy of Vive Le Vegan only arrived last week & this was the first recipe I made... Yay Dreena!

Crispy Peanut Butter Cookies

These are Isa's Cripsy Peanut Butter Cookies. They turned out a lot like Peanut Shortbread.

This is not a bad thing - very good in the middle of the night!!!!

Page 200 in Vegan With A Vengeance....

Marinated grilled tofu salad with ginger miso dressing - Salad Bonanza part 2

This one was made by marinating firm tofu in a ginger tamari marinade & grilling. Salad contains 'Asian' lettuce leaves (it comes from Woolworths - how authentic can it be???), grape tomatoes sliced in half (I HATE it when tomatoes explode in your mouth!!) and sliced capsicum. Dressing was made with miso, ginger, sesame oil, mirin and sesame seeds. It looked really cool after cooking - the colour of BBQ pork (or at least, what I remember chinese BBQ pork looked like). Recipe is from a cookbook called "Cool meals" (I think - a friend gave me a ton of recipes from this one). Email me at amytuite "at" hotmail "dot" com to get recipe - happy to help!!! So Tasty.
I'm trying out a new system of rating the recipes....
It gets 5/5 - how about 5 happy free and alive chickens!!! (No, that's lame!!!) Will try to find a good one!

'Chicken' salad - Salad Bonanza part 1

This is an ultra simple 'chicken' salad, made with: lettuce, cucumber, carrot, semi-dried tomatoes (from deli @ supermarket), Cheezly (from health food store) and 'chicken' nuggets (from Burlington supermarket in Fortitude Valley - Chinatown Mall). I've added a bit of NoFat Italian Dressing (I think it's Praise brand). Tasty!!

Apple Bread

I'm pretty proud of this one - the recipe was mostly my own concoction!

We're lucky enough to have inherited a breadmaker from my mother (she's off the carbs - yay for us) and I love making things with it! My favourite is Pizza, but I bake herbs into the crust with olive oil, so it's really yummy!

Back to the apple bread - basically I played with a recipe from the breadmaker book.

Ingredients: 270ml liquid (I did about 150ml water & 120ml soy milk), 2 tablespoons of oil (generous), 1.5 teaspoons salt, 1 tablespoon of sugar, 3 cups bread flour (it needs to be bread flour, not any other kind), decent shake of cinnamon (I'd probably go for about 3 teaspoons at least next time), yeast packet (they come in packs of about 12 in the baking section of the food getting place)...

Throw everything into the breadmaker. Turn on breadmaker & set onto the dough setting. After 1hr, remove from the breadmaker & shape. Leave to rise for about 20(ish) mins & bake. I tried putting cinnamon sugar on the top of one of the rolls & it looked cool.

I'm dying to try a recipe for choc-chip and apple bread, perhaps very soon.....

Tip-Top Tofu Loaf and Sesame Asparagus

The sesame asparagus was great (p124 Vegan With A Vengeance) but the tofu loaf didn't turn out very well (p 154 La Dolce Vegan). It's probably because I used extra tomato sauce & didn't bake it in a loaf tin (I used a loaf shaped ceramic thing)... The tofu loaf smelled awesome when it was cooking, but the texture left a little to be desired.

I added some roast carrots (just tossed in olive oil, garlic and dried italian herbs) and mushrooms (remove the stem and sprinkle some salt in the middle & bake on an oiled sheet - tasty juicy mushroominess).

It was an interesting meal - that took about 2 hours to prepare..... I'm definitely going to try again, but after I find a new loaf tin!