Category: Vegan Baking

Lemon Polenta Snacking Cake with Lemon Custard Buttercream

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While I am curious and uninhibited about emerging food trends, the term “snacking cake” inspires within me a certain luddite cantankerousness. How can this term justify its existence when all cakes can be snacked upon? I don’t need a cake to announce its relevance to me! And the offered criteria seems to just describe, well, cakes. I understand that we have yoga pants and riding boots and breakfast burritos and so on but “snacking” is too broad a verb to cling to that noun with such unmerited authority as far as I’m concerned.

However!

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Small-batch Peanut Mocha Cookies (gluten-free)

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Despite the fact that not once in my sixteen-year career as a food blogger have I ever had a large group of dependents to regularly feed, I still tend to bake as though many hands will be reaching for the finished product. What can I say, I like filling the tins, I like abundance, I like knowing that the sweetmeat I’ve eaten won’t be my last, that it has brothers rising up and multiplying behind it like the brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (actually that’s not a great analogy because that part terrified me as a kid, but it demonstrates the vibe nonetheless.) What care I for the small-batch cookie? Not much, initially. But my head can reliably be turned by novelty value, and so here we find ourselves with these Small-Batch Peanut Mocha Cookies, the yield of which can be easily summarised by Dee Dee Ramone counting off a song.

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Banana, Pear, and Dark Chocolate Muffins

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Of all the foods we’ve done a disservice to, muffins are probably low on the apology list, but! I just don’t think muffins should be six dollars, or the size of a sandcastle, or bogged down with too much ostentation. These are a simple, small cake, best homemade, cosy rather than mind-blowing, an accompaniment rather than dessert. Whenever a muffin is too rich or gilded or secretly a brownie or cupcake in a fake moustache and trenchcoat the effect is somewhat unsettling, like being drunk at 9am or regarding a map of Pangea with its sloshed-together outlines of all the countries. Muffins should be calm and small!

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Simple Rhubarb and Custard Tart

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Sometimes when a recipe appears visuals-first to me the result is abundantly successful, like these Marble Heart Cookies. And sometimes, in the case of today’s recipe, which I envisaged decorated with pink plaited ropes of shaved rhubarb fibres to tumultuous applause and frantic, viral sharing, it…simply doesn’t work. The stringy fibres did not braid smoothly, producing a bedraggled, limp and hairball-ish rope that immediately unravelled. So I set aside that folly and continued with this Simple Rhubarb and Custard Tart unadorned but for some green tendrils of thyme, and perhaps it’s for the best: chewing through a fibrous lashing of interlaced rhubarb would be, at the least, counterproductive, and the brink-pink splendour of the rhubarb stems themselves provide their own plentiful visual spectacle.

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Pumpkin Seed Pastry Hearts

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Call it Occam’s Cost-of-Living-Crisis Razor: sometimes the cheapest solution is the best one. Or at least, comparable. This recipe started life using pistachios, because I am a simple woman who will always be swayed by the glamour of that specific drupe. As is often the case the easiest recipes require the most testing — and by round three of working out the precise ratio of honey to sugar to oven heat I replaced the pistachios with pumpkin seeds as a less expensive green placeholder. Before you know it, we had a Shirley MacLaine/Carol Haney/The Pajama Game situation on our hands, where the bigtime producers were in town on the one day the understudy went on for the star. The pumpkin seeds performed proficiently, so pumpkin seeds it is.

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Raspberry Marzipan Cake with Lemon Glaze

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Now I’m not saying that me walking to Countdown, then to Smith & Caughey’s, then to a cafe with a few shelves of gourmet grocery items, then to a shop that sells cake decorating supplies, then to New World, then to a second, bigger Countdown, then to an Italian deli, then to an artisanal chocolate shop, then to Japan Mart, all in pursuit of marzipan, at which point I googled “how to make marzipan” and then went back to New World to buy ground almonds, means that you, in turn, are under any obligation to uplift this recipe to the sky or to simply not let it flop, but…as a freelance content writer slash food blogger whose hobbies include knitting and watching movies, I’m sure you understand that I had to get it off my chest just how far I walked. (I’m not quite done: it was 10,000 steps, according to the otherwise frequently dormant step counter on my phone.)

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Double Vanilla Loaf Cake with Strawberry Jam Icing [vegan]

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Two loaf cakes, back to back? Yes, I am aware, let’s just say I was eating the previously-blogged dark chocolate molasses fruit loaf, and the power of suggestion worked even more expeditiously than usual, a loaf immediately begetting another loaf. And besides, it’s nearly Easter, the sanctified season of sugar, we can just roll with this delicious déjà cake and put off our adherence to content strategy structure till after the long weekend.

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Dark Chocolate Molasses Fruit Loaf [vegan]

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“I make this all the time” is a blogging claim that narrows my eyes in skeptism — I mean, I myself have blogged about literally hundreds of recipes that I’ve made once and never again, not because I didn’t love them but simply because I kept moving forward onto new things — but I acknowledge that there are few comforts more supreme than finding another recipe that nestles into your subconscious, repeated and revisited to the point where the ingredients spring into your hands from muscle memory requiring only the barest glance at the source, and every time you return to that recipe it’s like greeting an old (and very delicious) friend. For me, this includes Nigella Lawson’s sandwich loaf, my mocha cake; my spaghetti with caramelised tomato sauce; my instant gnocchi; this vegan panna cotta and its variants; of course, the fried carrot noodles; my Thai yellow curry Mac’n’cheese, and Bryant Terry’s ginger-molasses cake, and it’s the latter which inspired, directly, today’s Dark Chocolate Molasses Fruit Loaf.

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Marble Heart Cookies

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It’s a delight and an honour to be inspired by other people’s recipes — sure, I’m good at invention, but my repertoire and palate would be limited and repetitious and probably deeply cringe without the welcome expertise and experiences of others. I love reading cookbooks as if they were novels and feeling my mind expand as much as I love taking screenshots of food styling and recipes, immediately forgetting them, and then finding them again while searching my folders for some long-lost meme and being inspired anew. That being said, my ability to conjure up recipes out of thin air and test them is like one of those theories of economics effects; it tends to correlate with experiencing relative stability in my personal life, with the data skewed by the occasional outlier flash of genius, or near-enough. At the moment I am, needless to say, leaning more on my own existing recipes or the wealth of knowledge from other people, and I am grateful for it! (That being said, and more important than any recipe: by sheer geographical luck my family and I avoided the devastating brunt of the recent floods and Cyclone Gabrielle; if you were also fortunately out of harm’s way and want to help, here is a round-up of donation sites, including links to support iwi relief funds.)

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The Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Recipe Round-Up!

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The thing about Christmas coming but once (thank goodness) a year is that with each iteration you realise, poignantly, how much has changed since the last one. While you could of course reflect upon this during any Tuesday or September, with its keen sense of tradition and consistency and focus on familial relationships and togetherness, Christmas certainly lends itself to introspection more than, say, Halloween — though don’t let me hold you back. It’s that very sameness that makes the changes sharply delineated, makes you wonder what will have transpired by next Christmas, but it can also be comforting; the same music, the same scent of pine, the same food. And despite the quinquereme of changes that 2022 has powerfully rowed into my life, we can all count on one thing remaining the same: my Annual HungryandFrozen Edible Gift Recipe Round-Up!

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