Vegan Baking

This vegan Buttermilk Biscuit recipe makes great vegan dinner rolls that pair well with American feast-style dinners on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas. They feature just the right amount of tahini and lemon juice to accurately impart buttermilk flavors.These biscuits are also great served as a snack with a smear of margarine or almond butter. Serve them warm.

Carrot cake is my all-time favorite dessert so I adapted it into a heartier sweetbread in the form of this vegan Carrot Cake Muffin recipe 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.

These cookies are one of the standards of our Christmas baking celebrations. They are crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. The crunchy pecans and tart-sweetness of the cranberries really make a complex and well rounded flavor and texture. They are really, really delicious!

Making your own pie crust is time consuming but a homemade crust tastes about 23 times better than a store-bought one. You can make multiple batches and freeze the rest for later use. Home made pie crust has that irresistible flakiness and gives you the satisfaction of knowing that you made the whole pie. This vegan Flaky Pie Crust recipe can be used for any pastry such as pop tarts, turnovers, English pasties or anything else you'd like to envelop in tender, flaky goodness.

In a pie crust the goal is tenderness and flakiness. This is achieved by a high level of fat and a low level of water. The fats serve two purposes: The Vegan Butter in this recipe breaks into small pieces, coating the flour and inhibiting gluten from forming. The shortening is cut into larger pieces so it doesn't break down as much when it's cut into the flour. This is so the shortening forms thin layers as the dough is rolled. These thin layers catch evaporating water as the crust bakes which causes the crust to form thin, flaky layers similar to what's found in puff pastry.

Holiday dinners at my Godparent's house was always a special occasion. The food was inspriational but the the one dish that my brother and I looked forward to all year was the simple but perfect implementation of garlic bread. This consisted of a store-bought flute of San Fancisco sourdough, sliced but leaving the bottom crust intact so the slices could be torn off as the loaf worked its way around the table. This loaf was buttered between the slices, wrapped in tin foil and warmed in the oven. Buttering the slices while leaving the loaf intact had the advantage of ensuring both sides of each slice was buttered. Wrapping the loaf in tin foil had the benefit of allowing the entire loaf to be saturated with buttery aromas and flavors during its time in the oven and the tin foil could be folded back over the loaf in between servings to keep the bread warm while it was on the table. Brilliant!

My brother and I eventually begged my parents to adopt this bread tradition for holiday feasts at our house. When I adopted a vegan diet we switched from butter to margarine and although the results were satisfactory, there seemed to be somthing lacking; substituting margarine doesn't always work as well as butter 100% of the time. 

Several years later I was having a dinner with friends and everyone at the table was falling over themselves in anticipation for Vlad's famous garlic bread spread. What was in this bread spread? I never found out but it was thick, dairy-based, rich, spreadable and smelled what a bread spread would probably smell like if you took the best elments of butter and sharp cheddar. Without even tasting it I was mesmerized by it. What if I combined these two garlic bread methods to make a vegan rich, buttery bread spread that could take garlic bread to another level? 

This bread spread recipe features extra virgin olive oil, onion, garlic, fresh tarragon and just a touch of white wine vinegar to envoke a complex buttery flavor with a sharp cheese inspired finish.

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.

Ultimate is not something that I throw around lightly, especially for vegan brownies. I've had my share of vegan and regular brownies and been baffled by how lacking vegan versions are. Growning up on my Grandmother's brownies, I learned that a good brownie should be dense, fudgy and soft; not light, cakey and dry. Why is it so hard to emulate a traditional brownie recipe that simply consists of a few simple ingredients? Hint: it's due to the egg, which emulsifies, binds, slightly leavens then bakes up as part of the actual base of the brownie itself. To emulate this takes an expedition deep into the innards of brownie science.