Vegie wellington and peanut butter cups

For a few weeks now I've had an urge to turn a Sanitarium vegie delights roast into a beef wellington. Last night I finally got around to it, and it... was... awesome! I really should have done this sooner.

There wasn't much needed in the way of ingredients, and very little prep work required. Initially I was going to go really basic and wrap the vegie roast loaf as is in the puff pastry but I had some mushrooms and hazelnuts so figured I would make a coating for the roast.

Veg Wellington
About a cups worth of chopped mushrooms
Half a cup of ground Hazelnuts
1 tablespoon of gravy powder 
Pepper
1 chopped onion
1 clove chopped garlic
1 Vegie roast
1 sheet puff pastry

Fry the onion, garlic and mushrooms. Add gravy powder, pepper and hazelnuts and simmer till thickened. The mix should be thick enough to be able to stick a coating to the outside of the roast, and stay put as you wrap the roast in the pastry. It didn't look like much when it was done - the mushroom mix started oozing out the ends.

The pastry instructions were baking at 180ºC for 45 minutes but it really needed 55 minutes to get the pastry nice and golden. It worked perfectly.

After dinner I had a go at a recipe for peanut butter cups from Alicia Silverstone's Kind Diet book. I had a go at making my own graham crackers using the recipe from the Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World blog.

Graham cracker recipe:

1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1/3 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
scant 1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup oil
2 tablespoons molasses (I didn't have any straight molasses, so I used half black strap molasses and agave syrup)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/4 cup soy milk

Preheat oven to 180ºC. Mix dry ingredients together well. Blend together the wet ingredients and then mix well into the dry ingredients. Knead dough together into a ball then roll out into a rectangle sized to fit the baking tray. Press dough into tray and mark into squares. Bake for 14 minutes.

In hindsight, I should have used just the agave syrup. The black strap molasses had far to strong a flavour and left me with biscuits that smelled like burnt licorice. They did have a nice colour though.

 

For the peanut butter cups:

1/2 cup Nuttalex
3/4 cup crunchy unsalted peanut butter 
3/4 cup graham cracker crumbs
1/4 cup sugar
1 block of chocolate

Recipe makes 12 peanut butter cups, line a muffin tin with 12 paper liners.
Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Blend in the peanut butter, then maple sugar and mix well. Mix in the graham cracker crumbs. Remove the mixture from the heat. Divide the mixture between the cup cake papers. Set aside in the fridge to cool.

The recipe wanted the chocolate for the topping melted with soy milk, but I prefer a hard chocolate shell to a ganache topping, so I just melted straight chocolate to top the peanut mix. The cups took about 30 minutes to set in the fridge.

Anything that leaves the paper that oily has to be good for you

The cups were really tasty, and not as rich as straight peanut butter cups. They were kind of oily though. I think they could probably have been made just as well either with less or no nuttalex, and maybe some soy milk instead.

There were a few other recipes from the Alicia Silverstone book on the website link and they look really good. I might have to track down a copy of the book.