cherry Archives - 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.

Treats that don’t make you fat

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.

Adventures in laminated dough

Okay, I’m a little behind here. A while back, I made a big ol’ chunk of laminated dough. Because really, it’s a pain in the ass, so you might as well make a lot and then bake it off in batches as you feel like it. The big takeaway here is that when you’re dealing with Earth Balance, it’s not going to firm up after a couple of hours in the fridge. You probably want to give it at least overnight. Otherwise, this will happen:

See all that goo on the pan? That’s most of the Earth Balance. The resulting croissants were tough, not at all flakey, deep fried in Earth Balance on the bottom, and just wrong.

I thought the dough itself was a complete failure. But I still had 2/3 of it left, so rather than throwing it away, I continued with my experiments. It got to rest in the fridge for a day or two and then I made cherry cheese danishes. Yes, vegan cherry cheese danishes. I posted a tease pic from my iPhone a while back, but here they are in all their glory.

cherry cheese croissants cooling — cherry cheese danish cooling

There’s still a little bit of leakage. But then, it’s summer in Georgia and I don’t keep my thermostat below 75. But starting with a well-chilled dough seems to have made a huge difference.

Seriously, look at those layers! And here it is all pretty on a plate moments before I shoved it in my face.

But I’m not done yet. There’s still a third of the dough left plus some more cream cheese mixture. Time to try another shape and another fruit! How about an apple cheese danish?

And again, about to go in my mouth.