Vegan Mars Bar slice

I ordered some twilight bars from the cruelty free shop and was feeling kind of nostalgic, so decided to turn one of them into mars bar slice. When my brother and I were little, mum used to always turn mars bars into mars bar slice, I guess to make them stretch further, and because she figured mars bars were just too sweet for kids to be eating as is. Mars bars always just tasted better this way anyhow.

Normally mars bar slice is something you want to make a lot of, because it is so moreish and addictive with the chewy chocolate caramel and crispy rice bubbles. I have plans to keep the other twilight bar for later in the week when we are babysitting nephews - melted down they make a great fudge topping for ice cream that sets into a nice chewy shell. I just had one bar left to make the slice from, which was probably just as well - once the batch of slice was set it didn't last us very long. If I'd made any more we just would have ended up eating more of it...

Mars bar slice: There really is not much at all to this recipe. Just multiply ingredients for the number of bars you are using if you want a bigger batch.

1 twilight bar (or use a jokerz bar if you want a peanutty version)
3 teaspoons nuttalex
1 cup rice bubbles
1 small block of plain chocolate (I used sweet william this time)

Chop the twilight bar into small pieces and place in a heat proof bowl with 2 teaspoons of the nuttalex. Rest the bowl over a pan of boiled water and allow bar to melt. When melter, stir till all ingredients are melted and combined into a smooth, glossy liquid.

Blend in the rice bubbles till they are all coated and stick together.

Press the rice bubble mix into a slice tray, lined with baking paper.

Melt the block of chocolate with the remaining nuttalex and stir till melted and combined. Pour this over the top of the rice bubble mix, and put in the fridge to set.

I have just started a reorganisation of my pantry and could not for the life of me find where I put the slice tray, so I used some silicon cupcake trays I got a while back. I like these little trays, not just because they make really cute little teddy bear cupcakes, but because they also mean I can skip on using cupcake papers.

From 1 twilight bar, and 1 cup of rice bubbles, I got 5 little cupcake shaped mars bar slice pieces. Yum!

White choc and raspberry cookies

One of the best flavour combinations ever has to be white chocolate and raspberry. Actually any kind of chocolate and raspberry, but I only had white chocolate, so we'll just go with that.

I've been looking for something to do with my bag of sweet william white choc chips for a couple of weeks now. I also had half a punnet of frozen raspberries left over from my chardonnay/raspberry jelly experiment. I tossed up between a few options (pudding, muffins, friands) before settling on a batch of white choc raspberry cookies.

Recipe:

1 cup of nuttalex
1 cup of fine sugar
half a tin of condensed soy milk
3 cups of self raising flour
1 cup white choc chips
About a cup of raspberries

Set oven to 180 C.
Cream together nuttalex and sugar till pale, then blend in condensed milk. Add in the flour and blend. This will for a very soft dough. Mix in the chocolate chips.

I tried 2 ways with adding the raspberries, the first I took some of the dough with choc chips and formed it into balls and placed on the baking tray. I then pressed 2 raspberries into each cookie ball and flattened them a little.

The second way I tried with the rest of the remaining dough, was to just blend the raspberries into the dough.

The first batch of cookies was done in 15 minutes, the second took a little longer and was in the oven for 18 minutes. I guess having the berries blended through made the dough a little wetter.

The cookies come out a little soft so need to be left to cool for a bit before lifting them off the tray. When they do cool though, they are beautifully golden and slightly crisp in the outside, but still soft and a little chewy inside. I had more dough than I wanted to bake tonight, so I froze half the dough. Hopefully I survives freezing, I think it should...

Here are some samples of how the cookies came out. Since it is only a visual sample you'll just have to take my word for it that they were damn good cookies.




Nom nom nom

I think I prefer the look of the cookie that had the raspberries blended through.

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.

Organic spinach breeds better caterpillars

I've never written a blog before. I did try starting a personal journal during first year Uni, and managed about a weeks worth of entries before all my good intentions vanished and my journal writing time became Tekken 3 time... So basically I am new to this, so please be kind :)

I've been reading and enjoying my friends blog at In the Mood for Noodles for some time now, and they have inspired me to have a go at starting my own vegetarian food blog.

For now, I thought I would start with getting a box of ingredients and turning it into a dish. Some of the ingredients I have started using are new to me, so there will be dishes that just don't work, and there may be better ways of using the ingredients that I am not aware of, and hopefully there will be 1 or 2 people who stumble across my posts that have some suggestions for me on how I can get better results.

The first dish I decided to make was a vegan version of a creamy pasta sauce. My fiance loves his creamy pasta dishes, but I am lactose intolerant so avoid dairy and eggs make me feel sick so I don't use them either. This leads to a sad cream, cheese and egg loving man.

I had a block of Sheese and a little carton of rice cream left from my last trip to the Radical Grocery store, so I figured I would have a go at cooking with these. A trip to Plump Organic Grocery down the road, and grabbed some vegetables and pasta and I was all set. 

The box of ingredients above contains:

Spinach

Asparagus

Mushrooms

Cherry tomatoes

Cheshire style Sheese

Creme di Riso

Savoury yeast flakes

Rainbow pepper corns

Parmazano

Also hiding somewhere in the box is an onion and some garlic but I think they were under the giant wad of spinach.

Since I had never used the rice cream before I, was not sure how thick it was or how it behaved when heated. I figured it was probably something that should be added after the vegetables had cooked, so I started by frying the chopped onion, garlic, mushrooms, and asparagus.

As a lesson on why all produce, even organic, should be washed thoroughly, while I was preparing the spinach I found a little family of caterpillars was still living on the leaves. One of these guys was absolutely huge, the biggest damn caterpillar I have ever seen! They nearly ended up as bonus protein in the sauce. If one hadn't moved during my rush job washing the spinach I probably would have missed them. At least you know your vegetables are fresh when the bugs are still alive. I really should have gotten a picture of them, one was nearly as thick as my little finger!

After I added the tomatoes and spinach (minus bugs) to the pot, I drained off the liquid that had formed from cooking the mushrooms. I grated in about half a block of the Sheese and poured in the rice cream, which was runnier than I expected. I tossed in some pepper, savoury yeast and parmazano to flavour and was done.

  

The end result was a little disappointing. The sauce was really runny. In hindsight I should have made a roux sauce base with the rice cream so that the sauce was a little thicker and able to coat the pasta. I also should not have drained off the mushroom juice from cooking the vegetables as this was probably needed for a better flavour, but I had been cautious of the sauce being too runny.

While I was at the grocery store, I also picked up a bag of pure cocoa butter. I have been curious to try cooking with this stuff for a while as I had heard it added a chocolate flavour boost to cooking. What better way to try this out than baking a batch of cupcakes?

To use the cocoa butter, I substituted the margarine portion of the basic cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World with a half and half bend of cocoa butter (which I had to melt) and vegetable oil. The end result was a batch of cupcakes with a subtle flavour that was more slightly coconut than chocolate. The cocoa butter did seem to affect the baking though, as the cupcakes really didn't rise much. They still had great texture, they just didn't rise much.

So next I decided to try substituting a blend of almond oil and cocoa butter for nuttalex when i made the icing. This worked well, though since the oil was warm after I had melted the cocoa butter, it did take a bit more icing sugar to thicken up than usual. The result was icing that tasted a lot like marzipan. Since it was really sweet and the cupcakes were so little and flat I didn't spread it on very thick.

Fail cupcakes. You may be flat, but you're still tasty.

Baking with cocoa butter I think has some merit, and I do want to do some more experiments with this to get it right. If only it were not so expensive though. I got the loving earth brand and it was around $17 for the bag. I still have some enough left to try a couple more batches of cupcakes to see if I can get a better result though.

Has anyone used rice cream before, or have any suggestions for making a dairy free creamy sauce?