Vegan Mocha Stripes

Well that’s it kids, summer’s over! We had sunshine for a whole week and now it’s raining. Again. Here’s hoping the rain doesn’t last as long this time! I hope everyone managed to at least enjoy the sun while it lasted and didn’t get horrifically burnt like me! Having to aftersun eight times a day even when at work is not fun. I have quite a few summer recipes I really want to test so I’m hoping August will put me in the mood as today I really wasn’t feeling it so I made these cookies instead.

This is another recipe taken from The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes by Kris Holechek which you’ll know from reading my other vegan posts I’m blown away by! All the recipes are so accessible and if you don’t want to go out of your way to find what I consider to be unusual ingredients like flaxseeds or different oils, you don’t have to! Even if you’re not vegan, these recipes are so delicious it would be silly to disregard them purely for that. Also, eggs are often the most expensive part of baking so recipes that don’t require them must be a good thing!

Whenever I’ve made anything vegan I don’t generally tell people its vegan (unless they are actually vegan) until they’ve eaten it as I feel it can often colour their judgement. When I tell them the reaction I get is always ‘Wow, I had no idea!’ which I always find to be a slightly crazy reaction because why should the absence of dairy mean that its going to taste weird or completely different to a non vegan cookie?! But anyway, this recipe is another classic cookie recipe resulting in cookies that are almost crunchy round the edges and gooey/chewy on the inside with the added crispness of the drizzled chocolate on top, mouth-watering!

They are very simple, take minimal time in the oven and taste delicious! The dark chocolate balances the coffee flavour much more than milk chocolate would. However, if you are not a coffee fan then I’d think twice about putting 4 tbsps of coffee in as it is quite a strong flavour but as I’m a big coffee fan I love them and have eaten two already…

Here is the recipe:

2 cups flour

1tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

4 tbsp instant coffee

¼ cup warm milk

¾ cup margarine

1 ½ cups sugar

1 tsp vanilla

½ cup chocolate chips melted (I used 50g chocolate)

Preheat the oven to 350°F (175°C). Line baking sheets with parchment paper

In a medium bowl, sift together flour, baking powder and salt. In a small bowl, dissolve coffee in warm milk. In a large bowl, cream together margarine and sugar. Add vanilla and coffee mixture. Add dry ingredients to wet ingredients in batches until well mixed

Drop tablespoon-sized balls onto a baking sheet, about 1 inch apart. Bake for 10 minutes until the cookies spread and the edges are set. If you are baking more than one sheet at a time, rotate the sheets halfway through the baking time. Let cookies cool for 5 minutes on the baking sheet before transferring to a cooling rack

Once the cookies are cool, carefully spoon melted chocolate into a sandwich bag. Make a small snip off one of the bottom corners of the bag to create a very small opening. Pipe chocolate onto cookies in thin stripes, zigzagging across all the cookies until the chocolate is used up. Store cooled cookies in an airtight container at room temperature


And don't forget to Lick Your Spoon!

White Bread

I made bread! While this may seem glaringly obvious as I am posting about it but, never did I expect my first attempt to make bread actually turn out to be, well, bread. I’ve always heard that bread is really hard to make and assumed myself that it would be because it’s about technique rather than simply following a recipe but I did it! And I’m very proud of myself however crazy that may seem!

Someone I work with, Glen, told me that he made his own bread and so I asked him to give me a very simple, basic, potentially Kathryn-proof recipe for bread. And guess what? It worked! He said that the simplest bread to make was white bread and wholemeal is overall trickier because of the texture of it. My mum also said from experience that homemade wholemeal bread can turn out rather dense. Needless to say, I went with the white option but after a few more practices I think I’ll branch out a little more.

A key part about making bread is the kneading. I kneaded mine for about 10 minutes in total at two different stages in the process. The idea of kneading is to stretch out the dough (I’ve heard this activates the yeast but that would be a lie…). Somewhere along the line through watching various cooking programmes and reading recipe books I picked up a simple methodical kneading technique. Once you have the dough on a floured (very important!) surface I pull the dough towards me wit the knuckles of one hand and simultaneously push it away from me with the heel of my other hand. I then fold it in half give it a quarter turn and so it again and again and again until I’ve been doing it for 5minutes.

Whether this is the proper way to do it or not I have no idea but it seemed to work well for me as, I may have already mentioned this along the way but, I made bread!

Vegan Chocolate Cake

This is one of the most amazing chocolate cakes I’ve ever eaten! First tried when my friend Rose made it for my birthday last year and last eaten for hers the following month, I decided that it was finally time to make it myself. I’ve also been asked to make a chocolate cake for someone in a week’s time so thought it would be a good idea to have a practise and it’s pretty lucky I did! I’m not sure of the origins of this recipe I just took it from Rose but I do know it was originally in cup measurements which is why all the quantities appear slightly odd.

For making the mixture this recipe is ridiculously simple. Whack it all in a big bowl and beat with an electric handmixer until smooth, job done. You then transfer it to the tins you wish to bake it in. I used two 9inch cake tins but I know Rose has used a square one before and that as worked fine also! Now. Here comes the part where I tried to follow the recipe but just couldn’t bring myself to do it!

The recipe says leave in the oven for 20minutes without opening it at all and then the cake is done. Rose did say to me it would still be moist so I was prepared for that however all but the edges of my cake were still liquid and I just couldn’t take it out like that! So I cooked it for 10 more minutes and then took it out but I must admit, it was still totally soft in the middle. Way beyond anyone’s definition of the word ‘moist’. I then left it to cool of about 10mins before I tried to take it out. ERROR! I basically put my hand through the cake and the liquid inside went everywhere.

After consulting with Rose, it transpired that you’re supposed to leave it in the tin to cool completely before removing the cake which I never ever do and she always always does! I left the other layer in the tin to cool and while it sunk slightly (again, apparently normal!) it did come out without creating a giant hole in the middle. To try and create something yummy out of my mistake I sandwiched the two cakes together with vegan buttercream and filled the hole on top with strawberries. It tastes delicious so while this time was far from perfect, I at least know where I went wrong!

Here is the recipe:

186g butter

450ml soya milk

3 tbsp golden syrup

1 ½ tsp bicarbonate of soda

374g self raising flour

74g cocoa powder

374g caster sugar

Preheat the oven to 180°C and grease and baseline your tins of choice

Mix all the ingredients together in a large bowl until you have a smooth batter. Put the mixture in your tins and shake

Lick Your Spoon!

Bake in the oven for at least 20minutes, bake longer at your own discretion! But do not open the door during these first 20 minutes

LEAVE TO COOL IN TIN - very important!

Then ice and decorate how you want!

Vegan Chocolate Chip and Pecan Cookies

“I’d like some vegan cookies that are sweet and nutty”. That was the ‘job description’ given to me by a girl at work requesting some baking. I knew Rose had made some pecan cookies recently that she loved so I established that pecans were liked and then left for the weekend with that in mind. It turned out Rose couldn’t find the recipe she used so I set about finding a new one. After some internet browsing I came across this recipe from The 100 Best Vegan Baking Recipes by Kris Holechek as a preview on googlebooks. While I was at university I lived on googlebooks and it’s pretty much where I got ALL my references from but it never occurred to me to look for previews of recipe books on there… until now!

This recipe looked straightforward and didn’t require things I’d never heard of that were popping up in a lot of other recipes I’d seen. And I was right! It totally was. Although I must admit I find soya milk completely revolting. The colour and the smell were so unappealing but then I have the same feelings towards milk of any kind so I shouldn’t be surprised. The mixture came together really well and was really fun to make! I should, however, have used chocolate chips or cut my plain chocolate into smaller pieces as they were pretty huge in places causing the cookies to be a little fragile.

I even got to use my new cookie scooper (basically an ice cream scoop with a bit to scoop out the inside) to try and make them all the same size to improve my usual presentation. The scoop worked really well I just ruined it myself by putting them too close together! While almost every cookie recipe I have tried has not spread, typically, this one did so some of them looked very square or even triangular! Luckily there were at least 12 regular ones for me to give to my friend at work.

With both chocolate chips and pecan nuts I’m hoping these fit the sweet and nutty criteria they were designed to meet and I’ve definitely found my new favourite cookie recipe and I will be buying the book to see all the other recipes! Let’s hope my friend likes them too!

Vegan Gingerbread Men

This month’s vegan treat is Gingerbread Men! (The clue was in the title really…) The child in me loves making these as they are so much fun. Cutting out shapes and ten decorating colourfully with icing and any other treats you fancy, what’s not to like? And of course, as is pretty much every recipe I’ve done so far, it’s super easy. This recipe was in fact designed by Waitrose with young children in mind. It also as helpful ideas for how to turn these into Christmas decorations!

As I did previously, to turn this recipe vegan I just swapped out the butter for dairy-free margarine, simple! While this recipe is very self explanatory, one tip I will give it to melt the margarine, sugar and syrup on a very low heat to avoid burning the sugar. This also helps keep the temperature of the mixture down (obviously) which is useful for when you mix it in with the flour and come to manipulate your dough as if it was too warm it’d be hard to handle and need chilling time.

Another suggestion would be to add some more ginger. If you’re considering making these, I’m assuming ginger is something you like so if I were you I’d add another 1-2 tsps of ground ginger to the mix. There are obviously other spices such as cinnamon that you can include but as I personally don’t like them I won’t be recommending that you do!

With my gingerbread man cutter I made 28 men before I gave up re-rolling and finished the dough off in a blob which gives you the perfect excuse to erm… ‘test’ the outcome when it comes out of the oven. I left mine to cool on the tray for about 3-5minutes before transferring tem to a wire rack to cool completely. To decorate I just outlined the men using icing pens and drew on a face and some buttons. You can of course use the icing to stick other things on or push things in for the eyes while the dough is still soft and warm.

Here is the recipe:

125g dairy-free margarine (unsalted butter)

100g dark muscovado sugar

4 tbsp golden syrup

325g plain flour

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

2tsp ground ginger (I recommend using 3-4 tsp)

Preheat the oven to 170°C. Line baking trays with baking parchment

Melt the butter, sugar and syrup in a medium saucepan, stirring occasionally, then remove from the heat

Sieve the flour, bicarbonate of soda and ginger into a bowl and stir the melted ingredients into the dry ingredients to make a stiff dough

Turn out onto a lightly floured surface and roll to a thickness of about 5mm. Dip biscuit cutters into flour before cutting the dough. Place the shapes onto the lined baking trays and bake, in batches, for 9-10 minutes until light golden brown and allow to cool completely before icing

Lick your spoon!

Vegan Flapjacks

At university, flapjacks were my baking item of choice as the ovens in our houses were not often very reliable. I also didn’t own scales and the recipe didn’t need many ingredients. Plus they satisfied my sugar cravings! I used to measure the ingredients out in a jug, guessing the quantities really but getting my own method down to a science. Since getting my own scales for the first time only about a year and a half a ago (shocking I know) I’ve converted my guesstimates into a measured out recipe which it’s the one I’ve used here, with a tiny change to make them vegan!

Why vegan? Well, my best friend is a vegan and since cooking, baking and food shopping with her, I’ve found it really interesting what is included in foods that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be there. For example, some pickled onions use milk powder as part of the preservative, as do salt and vinegar crisps. However, many ‘meat’ flavoured crisps such as steak or prawn cocktail flavour are vegan, go figure. 

Turning this recipe vegan is super easy as I just swapped my usual dairy butter to dairy free margarine. This is readily available from all supermarkets and you can use it as regular spread while dairy spreads like Flora are not suitable for baking. As I said earlier, the whole recipe is very simple, the hardest part is getting the golden syrup off the spoon and not leaving syrup lines from the tin to the pan! Running boiling water over the spoon before and after each spoonful helps with this, though avoiding the syrup lines is down to you.

The recipe I’ve done here is for the most basic flapjack, however, you can of course add anything to them you like. Some popular examples are chocolate chips, nuts, dried fruit and desiccated coconut. As for the quantities of these extra ingredients, that’s entirely up to you. Make them as chocolatey, nutty, fruity or coconutty as you like!

Here is my flapjack recipe:

175g dairy free margarine (butter)

125g demerara sugar

2 tbsp golden syrup

275g rolled oats

Preheat the oven to 160°C

Melt the margarine, sugar and golden syrup completely in a saucepan on a low heat

Add the rolled oats and mix well until completely combined

Pour the mixture into a pre-greased tin and bake in the oven for 20-25minutes. (When you take them out of the oven, cut them into squares straight away and then leave to cool before you take them out of the tin)

Then Lick Your Spoon!