Vegan cookies

To me, vegan baking is really, really hard - eggs are just a magic ingredient. They bind mixtures, give structure, stop things from drying out too much - they're by far the hardest thnig to substitute out successfully. It's the last week of the lockdown baking group that I've been (occasionally) participating in, and so I'm going to give it a shot - this is actually from last week's choice, but I meant to do it and didn't manage to get around to it, so there you go. It's this recipe, essentially unchanged.

Vegan Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients

• 125g Coconut oil
• 100g Caster sugar
• 150g Soft dark brown sugar
• 125g Coconut milk
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 275g Plain flour
• 1tsp Baking powder
• 1/4tsp Bicarbonate of soda
• 200g Chocolate chips

Method

1. Mix the coconut oil and sugars together.
2. Beat in the coconut milk and vanilla.
3. Stir in the flour, baking powder and bicarbonate of soda to form a thick batter.
4. Stir in the chocolate chips.
5. Cover and refrigerate for at least 1 hour.
6. Form into plum sized balls and bake for 12-15 minutes at 180C.
7. Allow to cool slightly before removing to a wire rack.

Batch 1 fresh from the oven. The liners got a bit rucked up when I put the trays into the oven, so some of the cookies are a bit misshapen.

Batch 2 about to go in while batch 1 cools in the background

They're pretty good, though I think they're a little too sweet and have quite a bit too much chocolate in them - the balance just isn't quite right. But they're certainly nice, particularly the crisp, crunchy bits around the edge. Slightly overbaked is definitely better than slightly underbaked for these cookies in my opinion. Not bad overall, but I don't think I'm going to be adding them to my regular repertoire.

Advances in automation

As of this weekend, I now have a breadmaker (thanks Paul!). Obviously baking bread in a breadmaker doesn't count as "baking" for the purposes of going on the blog, but I tried it out for the first time today, and thought that at least was worth a note.

So how was it? Well I followed the basic white bread recipe in the manual and... well... it's not great. It's not terrible either, and certainly for the 5 minutes or so of active time that this required, it's really pretty darned good, but discounting the ease of it all and judging solely on the quality of the output, it's not great. It's a bit dense, a bit close and most definitely too sweet. The latter part should be easy enough to fix I'd imagine, but the texture seems a lot like an under developed gluten structure, which might mean that the dough doesn't get kneaded sufficiently in the machine. I'll definitely have to have a play around with it to see if I can do better, but it's also nice to see that I'm not that easily replaced by a machine :o).

Baking for fuel

Most of the time, I bake for fun. This time around, it's strictly utilitarian. I've got a ~120km ride planned for the weekend, so I need on-the-go fuel - time for flapjacks! It's basically the same as my old flapjack recipe, but using dried cranberries instead of almonds. Very quick, easy, and hopefully tasty!

Cranberry Flapjacks

Ingredients

• 150g Butter
• 200g Oats and seeds*
• 115g Caster sugar
• 170g Dried cranberries

Method

1. Melt the butter.
2. Mix in all the other ingredients.
3. Press into a lined tin and bake at 180C for 20 minutes.
4. Leave to cool slightly before removing from tin.

*I could have sworn we had porridge oats in stock. All I could find was our homemade muesli, which happily is looking rather plain right now - oats with a small amount of sunflower seeds mixed in . It'll do!

Terrible photo, but fresh from the oven, it does look rather good!

Still not a great photo. Also I really can't cut things into even pieces.

There we go! A decent picture at last!

A Danish dream

It's Danish week! I'd never heard of this cake before, but it looks both easy and tasty, so definitely worth a try! It's this recipe.

Danish Dream Cake (Drømmekage)

Ingredients

For the cake:

• 3 Eggs
• 250g Caster sugar
• 1tsp Vanilla extract
• 50g Butter
• 200ml Milk
• 250g Plain flour
• 2tsp Baking powder

For the topping:

• 125g Butter
• 50ml Milk
• 160g Dark soft brown sugar
• 40g Caster sugar*
• 100g Dessicated coconut

Method

1. Whisk the eggs, caster sugar and vanilla extract until light and fluffy.
2. Melt the butter (for the cake).
3. Stir in the melted butter and milk (for the cake).
4. Stir in the flour and baking powder until smooth.
5. Pour into a lined tin and bake at 200C for ~25 mins.
6. Heat the butter, milk and sugar for the topping in a saucepan and simmer for ~1 min.
7. Stir in the dessicated coconut.
8. Spread the topping over the cake and bake for a further 10 mins.
9. Remove to a wire rack to cool.

*Bet you can't guess what happened here...

Something tells me that I might have added a bit too much baking powder...

Sometimes when a cake has an uneven top, you can level it off using the topping. This was definitely not one of those times!

Slight spillage in the oven. I'm very glad that I had the oven liner in there!

My word though, look at that topping! It reminds me a lot of ANZAC biscuits (sweet, buttery and coconutty - I guess it makes sense). It smells incredible!

Nom I say!

I was super impressed by this cake. Reading the recipe, I thought that the cake part sounded really boring, and I assumed that the topping would be the only interesting part. In reality the topping is lovely, but far too sweet on its own, and is nicely offset by the cake. You wouldn't want a more interesting cake as the base. It's a really nicely balanced recipe!