Dear friends,

I’ve got some good news and bad news.  The bad news is that my lease ran out and I no longer have an inspected kitchen, therefore I cannot legally sell my baked goods anymore.  The good news is that now I can post recipes!  If I’m not trying to sell the yummy things I make, there is no reason why I can’t tell you how to make them, right?  To be perfectly honest I prefer giving things away to selling things anyway, so this really suits me more.

What I want everyone to know about right now are these amazing amazing brownie recipes by Hannah Kaminksy.  I normally like to make my own recipes, but I came across these and are they are so fudgy and dense and chewy and chocolatey and perfect that I’ve just got to give her major props.   It was love at first bite.  Believe me, I am picky about my brownies.

Best Brownies Ever

Yes those are oreos in there.   I think it’s the oreos that push them into the realm of beyond perfection.  They call for vegan sour cream, which can be a bit pricey, but you can substitute puréed tofu and it’ll give it the same fudgey density.  Also, if you can’t find the bittersweet chocolate it calls for, use half unsweetened bakers chocolate and half semi-sweet chocolate chips, and it will result in the most perfect dark chocolate flavor that will have you yearning for a tall glass of soymilk.

I’ve been modeling lately and I brought a batch of these fabulous brownies in for the models and crew at School House.  Pretty sure the crew ate more than the models did…  Incidentally, although it isn’t food related, I feel like the School House line fits in perfectly with the ethics of many vegans in that the factory workers are paid living wages in Sri Lanka.

A friend of mine just turned 21 and although she requested chocolate cupcakes with latté frosting, I felt like a more boozy cupcake would be more appropriate for the day.   I happened across a recipe for Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes on Confessions of a Tart, (who apparently got it from Smitten Kitchen) and had no choice but to make it.  For those of you unfamiliar with the drink, this is what Wikipedia has to say on the matter:

An Irish Car Bomb is a beer cocktail similar to a boilermaker made with Irish stout, Irish Cream, and Irish whiskey.

The name refers to the drink’s Irish ingredients – typically Guinness stout, Baileys Irish Cream, andJameson Irish Whiskey – and the car bombings notoriously used by the Provisional Irish Republican Army(PIRA) during the Troubles. The whiskey is floated on top of the Irish Cream in a shot glass, and the shot glass is then dropped into the stout. Once mixed, the drink must be consumed quickly because it will curdle.

However, the name is considered offensive to some bartenders (and rightly so), and thus they refuse to serve it.   Probably the same rational behind why the Confessions of a Tart girl referred to her cupcakes as “Guinness Cupcakes with Bailey’s Frosting.”

Anywho, I’m thinking of it as the marriage of cupcake and beer.

You may now kiss the cupcake.

You see, the Guinness groom is wearing the bow-tie, and the cupcake bride is wearing the garter.   Now, you may be wondering why I have a sparkly green polka dotted bow tie, or even a green garter…  well, I like to be prepared for St. Patrick’s day.  Come to think of it, perhaps I should have saved this post for then… too bad the birthday girl couldn’t have had her birthday on the blessed day of green, eh?

Here is my veganized version of the recipe:

Irish Car Bomb Cupcakes
Makes 20 to 24 cupcakes

For the Guinness Chocolate Cupcakes

• 1 cup stout (such as Guinness)
• 1 cup (2 sticks) non-hydrogenated vegan margarine
• 3/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (preferably Dutch-process)
• 2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 3/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon oil
• 1/3 cup soymilk
• 2/3 cup soy sour cream (or yogurt)

Ganache Filling

• 8 ounces bittersweet chocolate
• 1/2 cup soymilk (use 2/3 cups soy cream if you can find it)
• 2 tablespoons non-hydrogenated margarine, room temperature
• 1 to 2 teaspoons Irish whiskey (optional)

Baileys Frosting

• 3 to 4 cups confections sugar
• 1 stick (1/2 cup or 4 ounces) non-hydrogenated margarine, at room temperature
• 3 to 4 tablespoons “Baileys”

Make the cupcakes: Preheat oven to 350°F. Line 24 cupcake cups with liners.

Put the margarine with the beer in a sauce pan over medium heat and bring to a simmer. Whisk in cocoa powder until smooth. Cool slightly.

*For the margarine, I use Earth Balance sticks.

In a large bowl, whisk the flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. In a mixer bowl, beat the oil, soy milk, and the sour cream together. Add the beer/butter/cocoa mixture and beat to combine. Add the flour mixture and beat briefly just to combine. Using a rubber spatula, fold the batter until completely combined, making sure to incorporate little pockets of flour on the bottom so that the batter is of equal consistency everywhere.

*At this point I found my cake batter to be too thick (like a muffin), so I added more soymilk a tablespoon at a time until it was a more cakey consistency.

Fill the cupcake liners about 2/3 of the way if you want flatter cupcakes and 3/4 if you want domed. Bake for about 17 minutes, or until a toothpick or a slim knife inserted into the middle of a cupcake comes out clean. Cool completely to room temperature.

Make the filling: Chop the chocolate and transfer it to a heatproof bowl. Heat the soymilk until simmering and pour it over the chocolate. Let it sit for one minute and then stir until smooth. Add the margarine and whiskey (if you’re using it) and stir until combined.

chopping chocolate!

Chocolate chopped!

Fill the cupcakes: Let the ganache cool until thick but still soft enough to be piped. Using your 1-inch round cookie cutter or an apple corer, cut the centers out of the cooled cupcakes. I went about half to 2/3 of the way down and used a small knife to help me extract the centers. Put the ganache into a piping bag with a wide tip and fill the holes in each cupcake to the top.

*Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t have a 1-inch round cookie cutter.  It was a surprise given my hundreds of cookie cutters…  but ladies and gents, I’m a smart and resourceful girl, and I used what I did have… a coupler!

Couplers! Good for piping cake decorations, and cutting holes in cupcakes.

If you’re not familiar with couplers, they’re the little doo-dads you put in decorating bags before you fill them with frosting and add the tip… if that makes things any clearer.  Anyhow, I realized it was about an inch wide, so I just pushed my trusty coupler into the cupcakes, and behold! Lovely holes:

Waiting to be filled with whiskey ganache.

After filling the cupcakes with ganache you must:

Make the frosting: In a large mixer bowl, whip the margarine for a second and then add the powdered sugar, until it’s stiff.  Now, this is the fun part.   Bailey’s is not vegan of course.  From Wikipedia:

Baileys was the first 44% liqueur to use cream and alcohol together in a manner sufficiently stable to allow commercial distribution. The alcohol in Baileys is produced from a bacterial fermentation of whey. The cream and alcohol, together with some whiskey are homogenized to form an emulsion, with the aid of an emulsifier containing refined vegetable oil. This process prevents separation of the whiskey and cream during storage. The quantity of other ingredients is not known but they include chocolate, vanilla, caramel and sugar.

So, since Bailey’s is basically cream and whiskey, what I did was simply alternate adding a tablespoon of whiskey and a tablespoon of soymilk to the frosting until it reached the proper consistency and taste.  Soy cream might provide a better consistency, but it’s difficult to find in these parts.

And then, my lovely cupcakes were ready to boogey down!

Cupcake and Beer, together at last!

As you can see, the bride traded in her garter for some groovy glasses.  Looks good, eh?  Want a close-up?

Ballin'

Ohhh, you wanted a close-up of the cupcake, not the glasses…

Rocking the do

I saved some of my chocolate from earlier and sprinkled it on top of the lovely cupcakes.  Delicious huh?  Seriously… it was delicious.  I ate one.   Yummmmm.

And I didn’t want to just completely ignore the birthday girl’s requests, so I took some normal non-guinness chocolate cupcakes, filled them with whiskey ganache, and topped them off with what I’m calling, “Irish Coffee Frosting.”   I recently discovered that Irish Coffee is simply coffee and whiskey… so I bet you can guess what was in the frosting.   Basically, I’ve come to the conclusion that when describing edible or drinkable products, “Irish” just means “boozy.”

Happy Birthday, Eve!

So, let’s talk about scones, shall we? 

Berry Scone

Delicious, sweet, biscuity, triangley goodness.   

Chocolate chip goodness

 Close up!

Melty wonderful chocolate chocolate

Scone wheel!

Scone recipe from Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s Vegan Brunch book.    She favors making drop scones, but I like doing it the old fashioned way.  Make a big wheel of scone dough, otherwise known as a bannock and then score the dough.  Bake it and separate the lovely little triangles.  Then, bless the British and their tea time pastries.   And while we’re blessing Europeans, let’s give thanks for the French and their divine croissants: 

Layers AND almonds.

Almond croissants.  The only thing better is pain au chocolat, or as Americans call them, “chocolate croissants.”   I do love my chocolat.

As always, everything is vegan.  Because that’s how I roll.

Jonathan Safran Foer was on the Colbert Report last night.   And since I’m the type of girl who does anything Stephen Colbert tells me to, I thought I would post some excerpts from JSF’s new book, Eating Animals:

CFE

Common Farming Exemptions make legal any method of raising farmed animals so long as it is commonly practiced within the industry. In other words, farmers — corporations is the right word — have the power to define cruelty. If the industry adopts a practice — hacking off unwanted appendages with no painkillers, for example, but you can let your imagination run with this — it automatically becomes legal.

CFEs are enacted state by state and range from the disturbing to the absurd. Take Nevada. Under its CFE, the state’s welfare laws cannot be enforced to “prohibit or interfere with established methods of animal husbandry, including the raising, handling, feeding, housing, and transporting, of livestock or farm animals.”

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Lawyers David Wolfson and Mariann Sullivan, experts on the issue, explain:

Certain states exempt specific practices, rather than all customary farming practices. . . . Ohio exempts farmed animals from requirements for “wholesome exercise and a change of air,” and Vermont exempts farmed animals from the section in its criminal anticruelty statute that deems it illegal to “tie, tether and restrain” an animal in a manner that is “inhumane or detrimental to its welfare.” One cannot help but assume that in Ohio farmed animals are denied exercise and air, and that in Vermont they are tied, tethered or restrained in a manner that is inhumane.

I grew up on a Hare Krishna farm where cows freely graze on the hills.  It’s so sad to think of them being locked up like that…  They make special laws for them!  You can’t treat a cat or dog in that way, but a cow?  Sure.   

CRUELTY

Not only the willful causing of unnecessary suffering, but the indifference to it. It’s much easier to be cruel than one might think. It’s often said that nature, “red in tooth and claw,” is cruel. I heard this again and again from ranchers, who tried to persuade me that they were protecting their animals from what lay outside the enclosures. Nature is no picnic, true. (Picnics are rarely picnics.)

And it’s also true that animals on the very best farms often have better lives than they would in the wild. But nature isn’t cruel. And neither are the animals in nature that kill and occasionally even torture one another. Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.

I agree.  We understand what we’re doing… 

DISCOMFORT FOOD

Sharing food generates good feeling and creates social bonds. Michael Pollan, who has written as thoughtfully about food as anyone, calls this “table fellowship” and argues that its importance, which I agree is significant, is a vote against vegetarianism. At one level, he’s right.

Let’s assume you’re like Pollan and are opposed to factory-farmed meat. If you’re at the guest end, it stinks not to eat food that was prepared for you, especially (although he doesn’t get into this) when the grounds for refusal are ethical. But how much does it stink? It’s a classic dilemma: How much do I value creating a socially comfortable situation, and how much do I value acting socially responsible? The relative importance of ethical eating and table fellowship will be different in different situations (declining my grandmother’s chicken with carrots is different from passing on microwaved buffalo wings).

More important, though, and what Pollan curiously doesn’t emphasize, is that attempting to be a selective omnivore is a much heavier blow to table fellowship than vegetarianism. Imagine an acquaintance invites you to dinner. You could say, “I’d love to come. And just so you know, I’m a vegetarian.” You could also say, “I’d love to come. But I only eat meat that is produced by family farmers.” Then what do you do? You’ll probably have to send the host a web link or list of local shops to even make the request intelligible, let alone manageable. This effort might be well-placed, but it is certainly more invasive than asking for vegetarian food (which these days requires no explanation). The entire food industry (restaurants, airline and college food services, catering at weddings) is set up to accommodate vegetarians. There is no such infrastructure for the selective omnivore.

And what about being at the host end of a gathering? Selective omnivores also eat vegetarian fare, but the reverse is obviously not true. What choice promotes greater table fellowship?

And it isn’t just what we put into our mouths that creates table fellowship, but what comes out. There is also the possibility that a conversation about what we believe would generate more fellowship — even when we believe different things — than any food being served.

It is true that eating with other people is often awkward and difficult.   Since so many people don’t understand veganism, I often end up eating a salad and a piece of bread.  Mmm.  Nutritious.  

As you can see, the excerpts on his website read like dictionary definitions.  The “bycatch” one really got me:

BYCATCH

Perhaps the quintessential example of bullshit, bycatch refers to sea creatures caught by accident — except not really “by accident,” since bycatch has been consciously built into contemporary fishing methods. Modern fishing tends to involve much technology and few fishers. This combination leads to massive catches with massive amounts of bycatch. Take shrimp, for example. The average shrimptrawling operation throws 80 to 90 percent of the sea animals it captures overboard, dead or dying, as bycatch. (Endangered species amount to much of this bycatch.) Shrimp account for only 2 percent of global seafood by weight, but shrimp trawling accounts for 33 percent of global bycatch. We tend not to think about this because we tend not to know about it. What if there were labeling on our food letting us know how many animals were killed to bring our desired animal to our plate? So, with trawled shrimp from Indonesia, for example, the label might read: 26 pounds of other sea animals were killed and tossed back into the ocean for every 1 pound of this shrimp.

Or take tuna. Among the other 145 species regularly killed — gratuitously — while killing tuna are: manta ray, devil ray, spotted skate, bignose shark, copper shark, Galapagos shark, sandbar shark, night shark, sand tiger shark, (great) white shark, hammerhead shark, spurdog fish, Cuban dogfish, bigeye thresher, mako, blue shark, wahoo, sailfish, bonito, king mackerel, Spanish mackerel, longbill spearfi sh, white marlin, swordfish, lancet fish, grey triggerfish, needlefish, pomfret, blue runner,black ruff, dolphin fish, bigeye cigarfish, porcupine fish, rainbow runner, anchovy, grouper, flying fish, cod, common sea horse, Bermuda chub, opah, escolar, leerfish, tripletail, goosefish, monkfish, sunfish, Murray eel, pilotfish, black gemfish, stone bass, bluefish, cassava fish, red drum, greater amberjack, yellowtail, common sea bream, barracuda, puffer fish, loggerhead turtle, green turtle, leatherback turtle, hawksbill turtle, Kemp’s ridley turtle, Atlantic yellow-nosed albatross, Audouin’s gull, Balearic shearwater, black-browed albatross, great black-backed gull, great shearwater, great-winged petrel, grey petrel, herring gull, laughing gull, northern royal albatross, shy albatross, sooty shearwater, southern fulmar, Yelkouan shearwater, yellow-legged gull, minke whale, sei whale, fin whale, common dolphin, northern right whale, pilot whale, humpback whale, beaked whale, killer whale, harbor porpoise, sperm whale, striped dolphin, Atlantic spotted dolphin, spinner dolphin, bottlenose dolphin, and goose-beaked whale.

Imagine being served a plate of sushi. But this plate also holds all of the animals that were killed for your serving of sushi. The plate might have to be five feet across.

I’ve been a vegetarian my whole life, and a vegan since I was 10, so I hadn’t ever even heard the word “bycatch” before.  I had always been under the impression that fishing was somehow less cruel than factory farming… but needlessly killing all those animals for a little piece of shrimp?  It’s so sad.

I’ve been snowed in at my sister’s house for the past few days.   She has two very cute babies… one is 2 and the other is 3.   Their grandparents gave my sister a dinosaur shaped muffin pan.  So cute!   The pan itself is shaped like a big dino foot print.  

dino pan!

If the photos in this post look a little ghetto, it’s because I’m still at my sister’s house and without my camera.  I’m using the webcam.  

As you can see there are two t-rexes, two stegosauruses, two triceratops, and two brontosauruses.   The packaging showed little cupcakes with the outlines of the dinosaurs piped on in colorful frosting.  I have no bags or tips or anything at this apartment, and I also wouldn’t want to give the kids more sugar than is strictly necessary.   They have enough energy as is.   So I made banana muffins and opted not to decorate. 

My nephew ate both t-rexes, and so this is what survived:

om nom nom extinct

The stegosaurus is at the bottom.   

dino dino dino

Triceratops!  

brontosaurus!

He’s a little harder to make out, but he’s definitely a brontosaurus!  Otherwise known as a “long-neck.”  Little Foot!   Although, Wikipedia tells me that “brontosaurus” is an obsolete term and that the dinosaur we fondly know as long-neck and brontosaurus is formally called Apatosaurus. Now we know!   

And as far as banana muffins go, this is a good recipe here:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Banana-Crumb-Muffins/Detail.aspx

To make it vegan use Earth Balance in place of the butter, and you can substitute the egg by combining 2 tablespoons of flour, 2 tablespoons of soymilk, half a teaspoon of oil, and half a teaspoon of baking powder in a separate bowl and then folding it into the recipe.   You can also use vegetable oil in the muffin part of the recipe to take the place of the melted margarine.   To make it low fat you can substitute apple sauce for the oil or margarine.

Good article from the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opinion/22steiner.html

What do you say when a dining companion says, “I’m really a vegetarian — I don’t eat red meat at home.” (I’ve heard it lots of times, always without any prompting from me.) What do you do when someone starts to grill you (so to speak) about your vegan ethics during dinner? (Wise vegans always defer until food isn’t around.) Or when someone starts to lodge accusations to the effect that you consider yourself morally superior to others, or that it is ridiculous to worry so much about animals when there is so much human suffering in the world? (Smile politely and ask them to pass the seitan.)

 * * * 

People who are ethical vegans believe that differences in intelligence between human and non-human animals have no moral significance whatsoever. The fact that my cat can’t appreciate Schubert’s late symphonies and can’t perform syllogistic logic does not mean that I am entitled to use him as an organic toy, as if I were somehow not only morally superior to him but virtually entitled to treat him as a commodity with minuscule market value.

We have been trained by a history of thinking of which we are scarcely aware to view non-human animals as resources we are entitled to employ in whatever ways we see fit in order to satisfy our needs and desires. Yes, there are animal welfare laws. But these laws have been formulated by, and are enforced by, people who proceed from the proposition that animals are fundamentally inferior to human beings. At best, these laws make living conditions for animals marginally better than they would be otherwise — right up to the point when we send them to the slaughterhouse.

Think about that when you’re picking out your free-range turkey, which has absolutely nothing to be thankful for on Thanksgiving. All it ever had was a short and miserable life, thanks to us intelligent, compassionate humans.

Yesterday was Sunday which means one thing in my world… Sunday Pastries.   I wanted to be Halloweeny so I made candy, pumpkin cookies, and breadsticks shaped liked bones.   Unfortunately, we ate all the breadstick bones before I thought to photograph them!    

Now, my pumpkin cookies are by far my most popular cookie:

Deeeeeeelicious

The cookies themselves are soft and cinnamonny and just a little sweet… but what really makes them so irresistible is that shell of frosting on the top.   Penuche is a brown sugar based frosting that hardens to an almost candy shell… and it makes my pumpkin cookies divine.    And good news!

In honor of fall, Halloween, and pumpkins, I’ll be selling pumpkin cookies for 50 cents this week!  Just email me at dina@dharmabakery.com and let me know if you would like any.   

But pumpkin cookies are old news for me.   I’ve been making them since my days puttering about in the hills of West-by-God-Virginia.   The new news were the peanut butter fingers I made!  The recipe I used specified the wrong temperature for the hard crack stage and so my first round of pbf’s were a bit too chewy and difficult to bite into…. but now… now they are AMAZING.   I’ve already eaten 3 today.

chocolate and peanut butter... unstoppable

 And in honor of Halloween, for the next week peanut butter fingers are just 50 cents each as well.  

And now, having nothing to do with food, here is what Wikipedia has to say about Halloween:  

Halloween has origins in the ancient celtic festival known as Samhain (pronounced sow-in or sau-an), which is derived from Old Irish and means roughly “summer’s end”.  A similar festival was held by the ancient Britons and is known as Calan Gaeaf (pronounced kalan-geyf). The festival of Samhain celebrates the end of the “lighter half” of the year and beginning of the “darker half”, and is sometimes regarded as the “Celtic New Year.”

The celebration has some elements of a festival of the dead. The ancient Celts believed that the border between this world and the Otherworld became thin on Samhain, allowing spirits (both harmless and harmful) to pass through. The family’s ancestors were honoured and invited home whilst harmful spirits were warded off. It is believed that the need to ward off harmful spirits led to the wearing of costumes and masks. Their purpose was to disguise oneself as a harmful spirit and thus avoid harm. In Scotland the spirits were impersonated by young men dressed in white with masked, veiled or blackened faces

And that my friends, is why we dress up in costumes, carve pumpkins, and eat lots and lots of candy….  to scare off the demons and ghosts that will be visiting from the Otherworld!    Happy Summer’s End!