abracapocus

Mmmm cherry juice

I’ve always loved cherries. My favorite pie is cherry. Love tart cherry jam. If I can get a hold of a vegan chocolate covered cherry, yum! Too bad fresh ones are so expensive even when in season. So when Cheribundi emailed me asking if I wanted to try their cherry juice it wasn’t a hard sell.

Cheribundi has three varieties, Tru, Skinny and Whey. I just asked that they not send me any whey since it’s not vegan. They nicely followed directions and the Tru and Skinny juices arrived. Of the two, I definitely like the Tru Cherry best. While you save 40 calories with the Skinny variety, the Tru Cherry has a more intense cherry flavor.

What great recipes did I make with the cherry juice? Well, I didn’t cook with it at all. I just drank it. Oh, I did make a cocktail. It took a while to find a cocktail that used cherry juice that I had all the other ingredients for. Which cocktail did that turn out to be? Why, the Louisiana Leg Spreader! And it ended up being sweeter than I like. But at least I did something other than guzzle this stuff out of the bottle, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I’m not sure what part of the country you can get this stuff though. According to the find a retailer function of their site, Cheribundi isn’t in any stores within 250 miles of me. As I’ve said before though, I’m more of a fruit eater than drinker.

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.

Awesome birthday dinner

For my birthday this year, Kevin took me to Cafe Sunflower. It tends to be the default special occasion restaurant for veg*ns in Atlanta, but really it’s good any time. While not 100% vegan, there are tons of vegan options and the staff can help you figure out what’s what. Also, kind of rarity for Atlanta veg restaurants, Cafe Sunflower serves beer & wine.

We started with fried brussels sprouts in a sweet sauce. They’re fried, so of course they’re tasty. But I really like brussels sprouts so I prefer them steamed or roasted if I’m cooking them at home.

Kevin had one of his regular favorites, the stuffed acorn squash.

And I had the pepper crusted tempeh. Under it that’s romaine lettuce, potatoes and a balsamic reduction sauce, I think. All rockin’.

And I don’t know if they’ve always had this lighting at the tables, but it’s very friendly to food blogging. 🙂

For dessert, I made my own birthday cake. It was a black forest cake and I utterly failed to take any pictures of it.

2010 World Wide Vegan Bake Sale

Okay, so Atlanta participated in the World Wide Vegan Bake Sale way back on May 1st and I’m just now posting pictures. Oh well. Cosmo’s Vegan Shoppe organized it and we took over the back of their shop. Who knew so many people would be willing to leave the comfort of I-285 to venture to Marietta for vegan baked goods? We sold out before the sale was over! Leigh has a better here of everything so I’ll focus on what I made.

Cookies! Chocolate crinkles, molasses cookies, snickerdoodles

New formula Teese

You’ve probably heard by now that the folks at Chicago Soy Dairy have reformulated their Teese vegan cheese. They were kind enough to send me a tube of the mozzarella style to try out. One of the best tests for a vegan cheese is pizza. So that’s what I did with it. And I pretty much dumped a whole tube of shredded Teese on this pizza.

So what’s on it besides Teese? It’s a cheeseburger pizza! So it’s ketchup and mustard all over the dough as the sauce, chopped up veggie burgers and pickles. And the dough is from Trader Joe’s.

The Teese does melt to a better consistency. It has the stretch thing going on and doesn’t totally liquefy like the old formula would. I’m sure it will work better for quesadillas than the old one. One complaint is that it seemed a little bland. I haven’t had the live for prime time version that is selling now so I’m not sure if that has been fixed. Still, it’s pretty awesome and I would never turn my nose up at a Teese pizza.

A gratuitous stretch shot: