Vegan Baking

I'm obsessed with baking because unlike traditional cooking, there are nearly no limits or boundaries to creating completely new forms of food. Effectively harnessing your imagination is the only truly required skill. Developing this skill, as well as understanding the fundamentals of baking allows you to create true art forms. Then you get to eat them.

Puff pastry is a truly remarkable building block for vegan baking because of it's versatility. It can be the basis of anything from flaky layers enveloping fruit, coiled into rolls such as sticky buns, or twirled into cinnamon and sugar twists.

Referred to in France as pâte feuilletée which means 'pastry made leaf-like', puff pastry is made of several hundred alternating layers of dough and fat. The water in the dough produces steam during baking that separates and lifts the layers into the puffy goodness that we know and love. This steam-assisted lift is known as chemical leavening. Puff pastry often gets a bad rap due to the many steps of preparation involved. Puff pastry can be a truly time intensive endeavor- if you let it. I recommend splitting the preparation into little pieces and working at it a little bit at a time over a few days. This way you'll only spend a total of about an hour on it. You also have the option of making your puff pastry and storing it in the freezer for a special occasion or for that day when you can no longer resist some sticky caramel cinnamon buns.

This vegan Macadamia Snickerdoodle Cookie recipe utilizes a soft, buttery dough that's designed to leaven fast in the oven then fall. This results in the trademark crackly top that some say give this cookie the origins of it's name; schneckennudeln which means snail noodle in German. Snickerdoodle dough is similar to sugar cookie dough but there is more leavening power and the dough is rolled in cinnamon sugar prior to baking in the snickerdoodle version. The result is a tender cookie that is slightly crispy on the outside and soft on the inside accompanied by rich cinnamon notes.

This Pumpkin Cinnamon Roll recipe takes every opportunity to pack itself with pumpkin and then enhance it with a delicate balance of cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom and cloves. Barley malt syrup can be a little tough to find but it's an essential flavor booster that puts the pump in pumpkin for these vegan cinnamon rolls. Rum Spice Icing is literally icing on the cake.

This deliciously easy recipe originally came from an Italian herb bread recipe I had begun to follow when I decided to branch off and make my own recipe, with surprising success. This bread is flavorful and sweet with agave syrup, followed with a hint of mint. Please excuse the rough estimations as I did make up this recipe as I went.

This Sticky Cinnamon Roll recipe features brown sugar, maple syrup and just the right amount of cinnamon, making them moist and chewy. And if that's not enough, these vegan cinnamon rolls are topped with walnuts, raisins then drizzled with icing to make them an irresistible treat any time of day.

I got this recipe first from my grandmother, who is anything but vegan, and tweaked the recipe. These rolls are fabulous, soft, and chewy. Personally, I like to throw fillers in the middle of the rolls, such as dairy-free cheese and jalapenos or veggie sausage. For those who may not look ahead at the steps, these are best if you start making them in the morning because they'll end up rising for a total of roughly 2 ½ to 3 hours.

The secret to making great focaccia involves using an herbed olive oil to lend an array of herb flavors, allowing the dough to ferment in a refrigerated state for at least 12 hours which allows complex bread flavors to develop and baking a wet dough at a very high temperature which ensures a soft, spongy texture and a crispy crust. Fresh herbs are paramount to infusing the right intensity of flavors in this focaccia recipe. Feel free to use any combination of fresh basil, thyme, rosemary, oregano, sage, savory or marjoram. A long, refrigerated fermentation allows naturally occurring enzymes within the flour to break out more sugars from the starches for the yeast to ferment. These extra sugars allow the yeast to built more flavor, sweeten the focaccia and caramelize under heat which contributes a multitude of enhanced flavors.