Posts tagged with dessert

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Petit Fours

Vegan petit fours? Now that’s a Happy Birthday! I used this recipe as a guide. Except the birthday girl just wanted vanilla, so there was vanilla buttercream between the layers instead of jam. I did try jam in some of my testers and it was yum!

I won’t lie to you, these were kind of a pain in the ass. A digital candy thermometer would make this so much easier. If you want your fondant to be white, get the whitest vegan sugar you can find. The Whole Foods house brand vegan sugar worked well. Also, invest in clear vanilla extract.

2010 vegan bake sale flyerHey kids! You all like tasty vegan baked goods, right? Then you don’t want to miss this year’s Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale! This year, Cosmo’s Vegan Shoppe is hosting the sale at their space in Marietta, Georgia Saturday, May 1st noon – 4pm to give those OTP folks a chance to get some tasty vegan baked goods. I’m donating some goodies…of course I can’t remember what I said I was bringing except banana cream pies. Yep, gonna make some mini vegan banana cream pies. You don’t want to miss that, do you? You can also promote and RSVP to the event on Facebook here.

The Metro Atlanta Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale will benefit Ahimsa House. Ahimsa House is dedicated to helping the human and animal victims of domestic violence across Georgia reach safety together.

Thanks Steph Timms for once again creating a super cute flyer for the sale.

The bake sales are being held all over the world, so check here to find out when and where one is being held near you.

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Bake Sale Success!

It was nasty, rainy and a little icy but people still came out. Atlanta’s Vegan Bake Sale for Haiti this Saturday raised $1365 for Doctors Without Borders. Holy Crap! A special thanks to Kristin for organizing the whole thing and Criminal Records for not just agreeing to let us do it in front of their store, but letting us take over the back of the store when the weather turned nasty. Those guys rock!

Kristin has a great round-up of participants here. I’d like to also add thanks to Alicia Simpson, author of Vegan Comfort Food, Alison Brown, Lisa Bennett and a guy named David, I think, for bringing out goodies to sell. The hard work of everyone involved enabled us to turn a bit of labor and ingredients into a much larger donation for Haiti.

And now, for some of my crappy pictures!

Setting up in the back of Criminal Records

Setting up in the back of Criminal Records

Becky & Kristin load up Table 1

Becky & Kristin load up Table 1

Front of Table 2

Front of Table 2

side of table 2

side of table 2

Some of my contributions:

hearts and flowers sandwich cookies, mini marble bundt cakes, brownies, beard-friendly mini cupcakes on a stick

hearts and flowers cookies close-up

nekkid bundt cakes before they got their glaze

After lunch at Pukk, we chilled for a while waiting for a long night of festivities. Kevin went off with the boys to Wild Ginger for dinner, then Lula’s Sweet Apothecary then they met up with the girls. The girls headed to Soy and Sake for dinner, then Local 138 for drinks and games, then we met the boys at the Slipper Room for baudy entertainment.

At Soy and Sake I think we sampled most of the menu. Plates of food just kept coming out! I was really bad at taking pics this evening. Here is a nice assortment of some of the things we had.

This plate is very fake meat heavy. The restaurant space is gorgeous. And all of the food was good. The lettuce wraps might have been my favorite.

Next we grabbed some cabs and headed to Local 138. It has a back room where we had our party. The bartender was crazy slow, and possibly a little fucked up, but made a perfect martini. So I can’t complain. In the back room we played games and ate boxes of dicks. Delicious chocolate brownie dicks and vanilla cream filled dicks provided by Vegan Treats. Since they are, well, dicks, I’ll hide the pic behind the “more” tag in case you don’t want your screen filled with dicks when your boss walks by. Read the rest of this entry »

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NYC Day 1

Oh, hello New York.

We got in Tuesday afternoon after an uneventful flight. We did get shit looks in the Crown Room. They’ll just let ANYBODY join these days. Ha! Anyway, we stayed in an apartment on Clinton @ Delancy and spent most of our time within walking distance. I figured our window would look out on an air shaft, but we actually had a street view:

By the time we got settled, it was time to head out and find lunch/dinner. We decided on Caravan of Dreams. Vegan, kosher, lots of raw, serves alcohol. We started with hummus and sprouted wheat tortillas. I like a thicker hummus, but it was tasty.

Kevin got this peanut fudge smoothie. I think it tasted like a snicker’s bar.

For his main dish, Kevin got the ravioli of the day. It turned out to be mushroom in an almond alfredo sauce. Really nice.

I got the taquitos. Love all the greens it comes with. This is the sort of food I love to eat. It tastes good and is good for you. And you feel good after eating it.

Of course, there was plenty of sugar to come. Somehow we ended up at Lula’s Sweet Apothecary afterward. Vegan ice cream shop? Hell yeah! I had a scoop of coconut fudge on a cone and Kevin got a blizzard made with cake batter soft serve and ginger sandwich cookies. I don’t have to tell you how good that was.

And no, this would not be our only visit here. After this we met up with Matt & Danielle at Counter. They had dinner, I had the dirtiest martini, Kevin got some fries. The drink was nice. Danielle’s pot pie was pretty good, but I like the recipe I make from Candle Cafe’s cookbook better. We’ll hit this place up later in the trip for brunch.

Where did we go next? Babycakes! I didn’t eat any of it that night, but we picked up a couple of cupcakes, banana bread and my favorite thing, a quick bread flavor called cinnamon toast. It had a crunchy cinnamon sugar crust on top. Mmmm… This wasn’t my first visit here either.

After this, Matt & Danielle showed us The Back Room. If you’ve ever wanted to experience a speakeasy, this is your place. I only wish we’d gotten back here to have a drink. Seeing it was still cool though.

How to get to The Back Room

How to get to The Back Room

Entrance is just past the toys on the right

Entrance is just past the toys on the right

Talk about a busy first day!

Confused yet? We have a group that meets once a month, usually for lunch. But this past time, we had dinner. At Loving Hut. We had a nice turn out. You should join us. If you don’t have veg friends, it’s fun to hang out with a bunch of like minded folks. And even if you do, it’s nice to see every once in a while that vegans come from all walks of life.

Now, on to the food. I knew some of the things I liked from the opening day party. Their rice paper rolls were really enjoyable, so I got the basil rolls:

Kevin sneaked in an order for Heavenly Salad. I didn’t complain. I love the Vietnamese flavors in this dish.

This fried tofu also magically appeared on the table. I had a triangle and it was nice. Light crispy panko coating.

Ever since I saw Pho on the menu, I wanted to try it. It was pretty good, but I think I would prefer a more garlicy/gingery broth. This one was more beefy and had a hint of 5 spice powder. I don’t hate it, but it’s not my favorite thing.

Kevin ordered a coffee drink and it came with this lovely strawberry flavored decoration. Not sure how I would feel about strawberry in my coffee, but it sure was pretty.

Something else from the menu that I had my eye on was the rootbeer float. I mean, where can you get a vegan rootbeer float? The rootbeer was really tasty and the ice cream seemed to be standard soy vanilla. One pro tip for you, tell them to hold the ice. It seems unnecessary when you’re dumping ice cream into a cold beverage.

Kevin also ordered the hummingbird cake. If you saw my most from the opening, you’ll know I wasn’t happy with the texture of the hummingbird cake there. It was kind of mushy. This one was much better. It’s still not as good as Lisa’s, but then how could it be? :-)

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How to warm up

Brrr it got cold here! Saturday I was being stubborn and didn’t want to turn on the heat. So I baked a bunch of oatmeal cookies to warm up the house. Then I broke down and turned on the heat anyway. The animals were really happy about that. There were cats draped over floor registers all over the house. Now I’ve got too many cookies in my house. That’s a terrible problem, I know. These have chocolate chips, white chocolate chips and walnuts in ‘em. I don’t hate raisins, but I prefer not to have them in my oatmeal cookies. Not sure why that is.

September has apparently been the month that treats come great distances to end up in my pie hole. First it was Voodoo Doughnuts delivered all the way from Portland, Oregon. Here is Chik-o-stik and something coconutty:

voodoo_donuts

Then Kevin was in Las Vegas for work. You know what Las Vegas means…Ronald’s Doughnuts! I was too busy stuffing a vegan boston creme doughnut in my face to take a picture, but you can check them out at that link. So, yeah, I’ve never been to Las Vegas or Portland, but I’ve sampled of their doughnuts. How cool is that?

But wait, I’m not done. Last week, Danielle brought us back these Vegan Treats cakes from NYC. Now don’t judge it’s appearance. It did get knocked around a little in its little container, but it ate up just fine.

Hooray for well-traveled, treat-totin’ friends!

How do you make delicious treats that don’t make you fat? You get them out of your house!

A friend of Kevin’s was having a vegan out of town guest and wanted to get some goodies. He’d been by the Atlanta Vegan Bake Sale and asked us to do a couple of things for him. Well, “us” is me, but that’s fine. This is the best kind of baking. I get to taste a little, and get the rest out of my house. I mean, how could you walk by these and not shove one in your mouth?

You also need breakfast for an out of town guest, right? How about cherry almond scones? Turbando sugar is the perfect grain to sprinkle on top. Damn, I would totally eat one if these if I had one here right now. See? That’s the problem with keeping that sort of thing around.

Blueberry coconut sounds kind of strange, doesn’t it? They were the answer to the question “what can I make for a dessert without going to the store.” And they were tasty too! I especially liked the effect of rolling the frosted top in coconut. It makes them look extra special.