When gliadin and glutenin proteins join together with the aid of moisture they form gluten. The more gluten in your flour, the more water required to hydrate these proteins into gluten. This is why bread flour requires more water than cake flour.
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The concept of reading words and numbers and using them to direct you to make something to eat is a strange thing. This simple list of directions is often the only companion you have in your quest to replicate what the original baker created. It's a good thing she meticulously listed all of the ingredients, their measures and thoroughly described all of the steps in an easy to follow manner. Or did she? If we were to go back in time a little over a hundred years or earlier, we would need a large heaping spoonful of luck for many of our recipes to turn out as they were intended. Luckily, recipe writing has evolved. Read on to find out how to write a recipe so it's interpreted in a clear, fun and informative way.
Crepes unlock huge brunch and dessert option potential depending on wether you make savory or dessert crepes. This recipe is pretty foolproof as long as you use the right pan described below. If making savory crepes fill them with things like tofu scramble, seitan and beans or wild rice and mushrooms. If making sweet crepes fill them with bananas, chocolate and coconut; peanut butter, maple syrup and walnuts or caramel, pecans and apples topped with a drizzle of Cashew Cream. Buckwheat lends an earthy, nutty richness to these crepes, which are based on Easy Crepes but factor in buckwheat flour's ability to absorb slightly less liquid than all-purpose flour due to it's smaller amount of gluten.
In search for a truly decadent frosting that is also resistant to melting in warmer temperatures, I utilized the power of soy milk powder (not to be confused with soy flour which is completely different). Soy milk powder adds extraordinary creaminess while still allowing the frosting to remain firm. This allowed me to use a simple syrup (sugar and water) for a sweetener so the frosting is silky smooth with no stray sugar granules. Finally, I used vegetable shortening as the main fat due to it's affordability and availability.
The firmness of this frosting can be customized to your preference easily by adding or subtracting 1 Tablespoon of water. This recipe also works well as a reference frosting recipe that can be customized into an endless variety flavors by swapping out water-based ingredients for the water and/or adding extracts to suit your style.
Coconut oil comes from the meat or 'kernel' of the coconut from the coconut palm. In vegan baking applications, coconut oil is very useful because it's solid at room temperature and contains no trans fats. Due to it being solid at room temperature it works wonderfully as a shortening or butter substitute in things like frostings, spreads, pound cakes, shortbread, etc.
Coconut oil is great for high heat applications because it has a high smoke point of 360F (180C). It's high amount of saturated fats allows it to have extraordinary shelf life, approaching two years without going rancid. These saturated fats also allow it to be solid at room temperature and melt at around 76F (24C).
Crepes unlock huge brunch and dessert option potential depending on wether you make savory or dessert crepes. This recipe is pretty foolproof as long as you use the right pan described below. If making savory crepes fill them with things like tofu scramble, seitan and beans or wild rice and mushrooms. If making sweet crepes fill them with bananas, chocolate and coconut; peanut butter, maple syrup and walnuts or caramel, pecans and apples topped with a drizzle of Cashew Cream.
I first became obsessed with crumb-topped bars when I discovered Whole Foods' "caramelita bar," a decadent mixture of chocolate, caramel, pecans, sugar and butter. Definitely not vegan, and not all that good for you either. If made with real fruit, the jelly crumb bars at least hit one of the healthier food groups. This vegan version takes advantage of the wonder that is Earth Balance and combines it with homemade cranberry jelly, dried cranberries and cashews.
Your baked items are only as good as your ingredients. I'm unaware of a single case where this isn't true. It's one of the reasons I stopped using tofu in my recipes years ago, although there are certain rare occasions where it shines. Plain yogurt provides a great way to add complex flavor and introduce mild binding properties to your recipe. It's not going to bind as much as an egg, but in things like cakes, pancakes and sweetbreads you don't need powerful egg replacers anyway. Read on for my review of the top four plain vegan yogurts currently on the US market.
Christine Dickson runs a great new website called Secrets of Vegan Baking where she features vegan baking videos, recipes, baking tips and a schedule of her informative vegan baking classes in the San Francisco Bay Area. Here she shows us how to make Chocolate Cupcakes with Chocolate Fudge Frosting. This recipe is particularly interesting because it features tricks such as bread flour, coffee and applesauce to make the recipe pop with flavor.
When I originally brainstormed the design and goals of Veganbaking.net, my aim was to make a vegan baking website that focused on all aspects of vegan baking without focusing too much on other alternative, buy still closely related, diets. I wanted to stay strictly on-topic. Besides, I wasn't really going to get much interest from raw foodies, people allergic to gluten and nuts, people looking to reduce their soy intake or people interested in cutting down on processed sugar right? Wrong. Since the launch back in the day I've gotten lots of inquiries from people looking for insight and recipes related to these close cousins of the vegan diet.
It's interesting how closely related vegan diets are to the dietary habits I mentioned above. All relate to a common goal: to eat what you feel is necessary and abstain from what you feel is unnecessary.
That is why, while you were sleeping, I painstakingly tagged the living daylights out of all of the the recipes on Veganbaking.net to make new categories for:
The recipes in these categories still live in their original categories but now they're 'tagged' in the above categories too, making them easier to find if you have a particular dietary preference. In the meantime I'm going to be more inclusive of these diets as I go forward in my recipe designing and writing frenzy. And more importantly, Please help grow the usefulness of this site by submitting your own recipes so everyone can benefit! They're all Creative Commons licensed and part of the Veganbaking.net goal of pushing vegan baking forward to it's maximum potential.
Carrot cake is my all-time favorite dessert so I adapted it into a heartier sweetbread so I could justify having it for breakfast. It's pointless to resist carrot cake goodness in it's new sweetbread form so don't even try. A dollop of almond butter on top contrasts nicely with carrot cake flavor and adds extra nutritious oomph to power your day of world domination.
If pirates ate brittle (and you know they did) this would be the flavor and this is how they'd describe it:
Yaaar ya kitchen dwellin' landlubber! Coconut, caramelized sugar and macadamia nuts be tied together with a splash o' rum t' make this t' brittle o' t' pirate seas, matey! So whip up a batch and hand 'er over before ya be plank walkin'!
They might also marvel in the fact that this brittle uses coconut milk, coconut oil and shredded coconut for maximum coconut flavor, except it would be hard to hear yowled in that thick pirate accent.
Ever since the eighties when two people were walking down the street in opposite directions, one eating a chocolate bar, the other eating peanut butter out of a jar, we've known that the two go together really well. We know this because the two people collided exclaiming, “hey you're chocolate's in my peanut butter!” “My peanut butter's in your chocolate!” This has been documented as a true occurrence because I saw it in a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial once. I'm so thankful they had TV camera's rolling to get that on film. But what was up with the peanut butter in those things? It always tasted like it was the leftover peanut butter at the factory that was too low quality to actually be put in jars. And the chocolate is typical mass produced American chocolate fare, over-sweetened and chalky which barely qualifies as chocolate to this chocolate snob.
With Peanut Butter Bombs I captured the essence of fine, natural peanut butter, combined it with some caramelized sugar and margarine, then covered it in a dark chocolate exterior.
This oil comes from the seed of the canola plant. Canola was developed in Canada in the late 1970's from conventional plant breeding from the rapeseed plant. Rape is the Latin word for turnip. Plant breeders bred this variation to make an oil from the rapeseed plant which contained less erucic acid than rapeseed oil. This new plant was called canola which was taken from the words 'Canadian oil' and 'low acid'.
At Veganbaking.net we stress taste before healthiness when it comes to sweets. If you're into vegan baking you may be a health nut and sooner or later you may be concerned about how sugar effects the body. If you're a junk food vegan, we respect that. If you're concerned with the health aspects of different kinds of sugar, read on.
Around 150 years ago it became cost effective to mass mill grains into the shelf stable product we know of as flour. Since this time, a host of health related anomalies have been occurring in the United States. The beginning of the mass production of food is regarded as marking the beginning of the Standard American Diet, or more appropriately named, the SAD diet. These health issues are likely caused by products containing flour and sugars that, after they're quickly digested, turn into a flash flood of sugar that our bodies aren't capable of handling multiple times a day. To reduce having major health issues later in life, we'd like to remind you that highly processed foods should be enjoyed in moderation. When you're not overindulging in desserts, It's a good idea to eat natural food that is minimally processed and provides consistent energy without spiking your blood sugar. Luckily, this can be done while still eating amazing food. Enter Manna Bread.
