Tag: recipe

Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

vegan chocolate chip cookie recipe

At Dough, one of the most requested items in our bakery case was the chocolate chip cookies. They were big, crisp around the edges and chewy in the center. And completely irresistible when they were still warm. If I’m totally honest with you, one reason we didn’t have them in the case every single day is that I would eat them every single day. Seriously, I can’t stop myself. Take that as a warning.

This recipe isn’t too far off from most vegan chocolate chip cookie recipes, but there is a secret ingredient that most others don’t have. Well, it’s not going to be secret in a second. That secret ingredient is brown rice syrup. Yes, that’s the magical ingredient that gives them a little extra chewiness. If you don’t have any or it is hard to get where you are, you can substitute corn syrup.

vegan chocolate chip cookies

Chewy Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

Makes about 4 dozen small cookies

3/4 cup Earth Balance margarine
2/3 cup dark brown sugar
2/3 cup granulated sugar
2 tablespoons brown rice syrup
1 tablespoon cider vinegar or white vinegar
2 flax eggs (2 tablespoons ground flax seed mixed with 1/4 cup warm water)
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
2 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
3 cups chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Line baking sheets with parchment.

2. In a large mixer bowl, cream together the Earth Balance, sugars, brown rice syrup, and vinegar, then beat in the flax eggs. Beat in the vanilla, salt, baking powder, and baking soda. Stir in the flour and chocolate chips.

3. Drop by cookie scoop or spoon onto the prepared baking sheets. Bake the cookies for 12 minutes, until they’re just set; the centers may still look a bit underdone. Remove them from the oven, and cool complete on a rack.

I’ll be posting more recipes from Dough from time to time. Any requests? Just leave it in the comments.

Would you have any interest in an ebook of vegan baking recipes? Drop your email below and I’ll contact you if I do one!

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Vegan King Cake Recipe

vegan king cake recipe

It’s weird. This is the first year in a while that I haven’t made vegan King Cake. It was hugely popular at the bakery and we sold through it as fast as it could be made. It’s not as hard to make as it looks.

Many people are afraid to make anything that involves yeast because they’ve had some failures. I have two tips that will help you deal with yeast.

First, when a recipe says to proof your active dry yeast in warm water, you have to make sure the water isn’t too hot or too cold. Above 140F will kill the yeast. The internet says the ideal temperature is somewhere between 130F and 140F. So your faucet water might be hotter than that and you might be killing the yeast right at the beginning. Of course, your active dry yeast might already be dead which seemed to happen to me about half the time.

Which leads me to my second tip…don’t use active dry yeast. Use instant yeast. Once I discovered instant yeast, I never looked back. No proofing required. Just add the same amount as the active dry yeast called for in with the flour and whisk in. Any liquid and/or sugar the recipe called for to proof the active dry yeast, just add in when the recipe calls for those ingredients or similar ingredients (liquid or sweetener.) Also, your dough will probably rise faster than the recipe says. Most recipes tell you to let it rise for a time period OR when the dough has doubled. Just put the dough in a container where it will be easy to mark double the starting level. Check it in half the time then gauge from that how often you’ll need to check before it gets to double.  Seriously, replacing active dry yeast with instant yeast in your baking will change your life.

The recipe we used at Dough was adapted from Kittee Berns‘ recipe in her cookzine Papa Tofu.  She has posted some updated King Cake recipes including a vegan gluten-free one so head on over to her site if you’d like to check those out.

vegan king cake recipe

Vegan King Cake Recipe

Makes 2 King Cakes

Ingredients

Cake:
2 ounces (1/4 cup) Earth Balance
1 12 oz. box firm silken tofu
2 teaspoons lemon juice
4 ounces (1/4 8 oz. tub) Tofutti cream cheese
⅓ cup sugar
1 teaspoon salt
4 ½ teaspoons instant yeast
1 tablespoon Ener-G egg replacer mixed in 3/4 cup water
6 cups unbleached white flour
2 babies or just use dried beans if you don’t have babies
Frosting:
3 cups powdered sugar, sifted
1.5 ounce (2 1/2 tablespoons) Earth Balance, melted
4 tablespoons non-dairy milk
¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
yellow, green and purple colored sprinkles (can’t find vegan sprinkles? Kittee has instructions for making your own at the bottom of this page. Remember, while confectioners glaze can be vegan, it rarely is.)

Instructions

Whiz the silken tofu in the food processor with the lemon juice and cream cheeze. Set aside.

Combine the Earth Balance, tofu cream cheeze mixture, 1/3 cup sugar and teaspoon salt in a medium saucepan. Heat until the margarine melts, stirring occasionally until smooth. Let the mixture cool to at least 105-115F.

Add the cooled tofu cream cheeze mixture, the egg substitute liquid, yeast and flour to a mixer bowl. Knead with dough hook until smooth, about 6 minutes. You can do this by hand. I have no idea how long it will take. Do it until the dough is completely smooth and elastic.

Place the dough in a well-oiled bowl, turning to coat top. Cover and let rise in a warm place for 1 hour or until the dough has doubled. If it’s kind of cold, it won’t be ruined, it’ll just take longer.

Meanwhile, get your choice of filling ready. Scroll down for recipes.

Punch down the dough and divide in half. Turn one portion out onto the table and roll into a 22″X12″ rectangle. Or as close as you can get to that.

Spread half of your chosen filling(s) over the rolled out dough. Leave about two inches free on the top for the cream cheese variety, because otherwise the filling will squish up as you roll up the dough and ooze out the top.

Starting at the bottom (wide side), roll the dough up jellyroll style to form a thick log about 22″ long. Hide a small plastic doll somewhere in the dough as you roll it up.

Pinch the seam really, really well to seal. Gently place the coil, seam side down, on a parchment covered baking sheet. Bring the ends together to form a ring. Pinch the ends together to seal well (if you don’t seal it properly, it will open up during baking and ooze).

Let rise in a warm place for 20 minutes. Preheat oven to 350F.

Bake for 20 minutes at 350F until golden brown.

For the frosting glaze:

Melt the margarine.
Combine the melted margarine, sifted powdered sugar, milk and extract together and beat with a spatula ’till smooth.
Frost each cake with half the frosting then sprinkle with yellow, purple & green sprinkles.

FILLING OPTIONS (each is enough for 2 King Cakes)

Cinnamon sugar filling:

1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/3 cup Earth Balance very soft

Mix sugar, cinnamon and softened margarine together well.

For the cream cheeze filling:

12 oz. Tofutti Cream Cheeze
2 tablespoons unbleached all purpose flour
1 cup powdered sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Beat the cream cheeze until smooth.
Beat in the flour, sugar and extract until smooth.

Happy King Caking!

Quick, versatile tofu recipe

People seem to spend a lot of time fretting over how to flavor their tofu. Yes, there are a billion different marinade recipes out there and preparation methods. But sometimes simple is best. Especially when you’re lazy.

This is my goto seasoned tofu recipe. It’s generic enough that it can go in almost any cuisine. But flavorful enough that you’ll find yourself popping cubes in your mouth before the rest of the meal is done.

Quick Tofu Recipe

Ingredients

tamari, chili garlic paste, sesame oil

1 lb. firm or extra firm tofu, pressed
2 tablespoons Tamari, Bragg’s or Soy Sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1/2-1 teaspoon chili garlic paste
oil for frying or baking pan prep

Directions

First cube your pressed tofu.

cubed tofu

Put it in a medium bowl. Add the remaining ingredients except the oil for the pan. Stir it around until it is coated.

bowl of tofu

There are three different ways I finish it off, depending on my needs. You can fry it up in a pan until browned. You can bake it in the oven at 375F on a sheet sprayed with oil for about 20 minutes, flipping them at about 10 minutes in. Or, instead of cubing the tofu you can cut it in sticks or slabs and put it in a George Foreman grill, use a grill pan or even grill it outside. My first preference is to bake it. And my second choice is to pan fry, especially when my oven is broken like it was for a while.

browned tofu

We eat this tofu on salads, in burritos, and dropped into any other dish that feels like it wants some tofu in it. Since there’s no marinating required, it comes together quickly. The hardest part is remembering to press the tofu. We have a Tofu Xpress so I usually just keep a block of tofu in it in the fridge so it’s ready to go. It seems expensive for what it is, but sometimes it is worth it to pay for convenience.

How to make brown sugar

One of the cool things about Vegan Mofo is that while you’re cruising around checking out other people’s posts, you get ideas for new posts of your own.

This happened to me yesterday as I read Bianca’s post about vegan sugars. It’s true, it can be hard to find vegan brown sugar and powdered sugar in certain places. And sometimes even when you find it, it’s really expensive.

A while back, our supplier for the bakery was out of vegan brown sugar. For a few weeks. Our supply was completely cached and we had to figure something out. Buying retail bags would be way too expensive. Since brown sugar is just sugar and molasses, you can just add sugar to molasses! Der. I just googled how to make brown sugar to get the ingredient ratio. After this, we just kept making it instead of buying it. It’s cheaper and easy to do.

At home this is especially handy when you don’t bake often and would rather not have an extra bag of stuff you rarely use taking up space in your cabinet. So here’s how to make brown sugar:

vegan brown sugar

Brown Sugar Recipe

Ingredients

1 cup vegan sugar
1 tablespoon molasses for light brown sugar, 2 tablespoons for dark brown sugar

Mix together with a hand mixer or stand mixer. Use immediately or store in an air tight container.

Vegan Spiced Peach Carrot Bread

Just because you’re vegan, that doesn’t mean you have to throw out all of your non-vegan cookbooks. Making a recipe vegan is oftentimes really simple. If the recipe is good in the first place, making it vegan won’t change that fact.

This June, the peach tree we had at the bakery produced a bumper crop. So many peaches. So I needed to come up with some more ways to use them. I did the expected peach cobbler, peach pie, and even some peach crumb muffins. So I turned to the internet like we modern folks do. And this Spiced Peach Carrot Bread caught my eye.

When trying to find an easy baking recipe to veganize, look for one that has two or fewer eggs. It’s not that you can’t veganize one with more eggs, fewer is just easier. Milk and butter are easy to replace your non-dairy milk of choice and Earth Balance.  My egg replacer of choice in most baked goods is flax. I use one tablespoon of ground flax plus two tablespoons of warm water to replace each egg. So here’s this recipe above as made and served at the bakery:

Vegan Spiced Peach Carrot Bread

vegan spiced peach carrot bread

Ingredients

¾ cup chopped pecans
2 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
¾ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 ½ cups peeled and chopped fresh, ripe peaches
¾ cup freshly grated carrots
⅔ cup vegetable oil
½ cup non-dairy milk
2 flax eggs

Directions

Preheat oven to 350°. Toast pecans in pan on stove top until fragrant. Cool 15 minutes.

Stir together flour and the rest of the dry ingredients in a large bowl; add peaches, remaining ingredients, and toasted pecans, stirring just until dry ingredients are moistened. Spoon batter into a lightly greased 9- x 5-inch loaf pan.

Bake for 1 hour and 5 minutes to 1 hour and 10 minutes or until a long wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool in pan on a wire rack 5 minutes. Remove from pan to wire rack, and cool completely (about 1 hour).