MidWeek Munchies: Sweet Treats

Here are some sweet treats I have been enjoying over the last few months.

My friend Amy made these super cute sprinkle doughnuts. I am too scared to deep fry doughnuts, but Amy is super brave!



This Loving Earth Raw Lemon Caramel chocolate is delicious, even though I don't normally like raw chocolate or caramel things. I like a lot of their other flavours as well.



I won some vegan jubes made by Red Balloon in a competition a while ago. While not all of the flavours were my cup of tea (it was assorted, and I wasn't sure what a flavour might be until I committed and bit into it), the ones that were to my taste were very nice. Good texture.



Fairy bread is great! If you aren't Australian, then you have been missing out. Bread (white to be the most authentic), margarine and Hundreds and Thousands! The important part is that hundreds and thousands are multicoloured little hard balls, they are not the longer sprinkles that seem to be around in the US. This is crucial. The day I found vegan hundreds and thousands, I ate so much fairy bread! Also pictured with the Sugar Hex body scrub I got from Bonnie's Bathhouse, a local vegan skin care company.



A terrible photo of some great trial mix I made. It has freeze-dried strawberries, mini raw carrot cake cookies, chocolate covered raisins and maple walnuts and chocolate covered coconut in it. So good!



A ridiculous snack I made. It is a chocolate covered rice cake spread with Speculoos and topped with fresh raspberries.



I enjoyed these crunchy little choc-chip cookies with a turmeric latte. Though they were all shaped like animals, so I felt a bit bad munching on them. #toovegantofunction



I picked up these treats last week from The Green Edge. Haven't tried them yet, but excited to. The chocolate bar is the Go-Max-Go version of a Twix. I loved Twix bars, and have been waiting for someone to make a vegan one for years. I expect that I will eat it, declare it far too sweet, and there will end my cravings.



And finally, these stunning chocolates that I ordered from Treat Dreams. Treat Dreams is a small vegan handmade chocolate business based in Sydney, and they have recently started shipping interstate. It was a bit of a wait from ordering to delivery, but the wait was worth it. There are their version of Ferrero Rochers, which are way better than the original. But most importantly, the Strawberry and Cream hearts. They are the most amazing chocolates! I love them so much. I want to marry them. Alas, they are a bit pricey to be a regular occurrence.



What sweet treats have you been enjoying lately?

Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



As promised, the first in a series of Dim Sim posts. The other day, I somehow convinced Dim Sim to lie on her back in my lap. As you can see, she was not incredibly impressed. But she let me rub her tummy.

Midweek Munchies

Hello friends, how are you? Back with another easy midweek munchies post. I am back at work this week, holidays over. Also every spare cell of brain space I have is currently taken up with my Our Flag Means Death hyperfixation. I did go to the Taylor Swift Era's film last week as well (N95 mask firmly attached), and 1989 Taylor's Version comes out on Friday. So my niche fixation is finding OFDM edits to Taylor Swift songs on TikTok. What a time to be alive. But here are some snacks and things.

I bought this Black Lemonade brownie mix ages ago, and finally used it to take to a housewarming. It is also gluten free (the person I was going to see is gluten free, so that was handy) and extremely east to make. The brownies were incredible, I could not tell they were gluten free, and I loved the tangy raspberry flavour in them.



Some vegan fairy bread, which I enjoyed at said housewarming. Going to a housewarming was a bit strange given *gestures at pandemic*, but I wore a mask except for the very quick times I nipped off for a snack.



These vegan Japanese sauces are available at Woolworths. I used the Yakisoba sauce to make some quick yakisoba using some noodles, prepared tofu, and stir-fry vegetables. The okonomi sauce is excellent for putting on or mixing through things as well.





I got these Pickled Mushroom chips from Ikea! They needed more flavour on them, but I could get a hint of pickled and maybe a whisper of earthy mushroom from them.



New vegan deli slices dropped at Coles, though I haven't seen them since. They were OK, the salami has a lot of pepper in it. The chicken slices were the best, and better than the other vegan chicken slices on the market.



Cheese and Onion Crunchy Corn that a friend from Scotland sent me! These were so fun, and had a really nice flavour. I am not a fan of popcorn, but I am a fan of these crunchy corn kernels.



Finally someone gave me some of the new Whittakers Oat Milk Chocolate. It is not bad for a milk-style chocolate, not too sweet.



Tell me what you have been hyperfixating on lately? Or I guess, if you have a neurotypical brain, what you have been enjoying.

Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Another funny Eloise photo. She makes the best shapes.

UK/Spain 2024 Part 9: Last day in Scotland

Sigh.

I don't know why all good things must come to an end, but sadly the Scotland portion of my trip was rapidly coming to its conclusion. For my last full day in Scotland, we just hung out at Jojo's house, ate food, visited the sheepies, watched every Taylor Swift music video in chronological order. You know, regular things like that.

When I first got there Jojo wrote this super cute list for food planning of things we were going to eat while we were at her place. The highlighted ones were the ones we still needed to eat on the last day. The only thing we didn't manage to make was fairy bread, which is fine because as an Australian we invented fairy bread and I can eat it whenever I want.


The chocolate croissants were some randomly vegan friendly frozen ones from a supermarket. I can't remember what their brand was because I didn't take a photo of it. They were not really croissants, more like chocolate filled buns, maybe? But they were yummy once we baked them.



Finally, after hearing about them so many times, I tried Bourbon Creams! And learned that they pronouce the word 'bourbon' differently in the UK compared to here. These chocolate filled chocolate biscuits have nothing to do with the alcohol bourbon, and are very nice.



I had to have a tiny nibble of the Babybel plant based cheese, because I loved Babybel cheese when I would younger in my pregan days. Only a tiny nibble though, because it is made of like 90% coconut oil and I could tell.



Hawaiian Pizza! I wish I could remember if this was frozen or partly home made but I cannot. Fibro brain fog is real and my memory is kind of trash these days. And of course I didn't write anything down this trip. But I feel like it was partly premade and we added some extra toppings to make it better.



We had some leftover cheeses that we finished up, along with some of the Philadelphia Vegan Cream Cheese. I liked it! Bring it to Australia please Philadelphia!



Then it was my final visit to see the sheepies, and walk around Jojo's lovely property.







Back at the house, we made some fun afternoon tea! I enjoyed both of these.





And I finally tried a sip of IrnBru, Scotland's famous soft drink. I don't drink fizzy drinks (except for kombucha), but I simply had to have a taste. What does it taste like? Kind of orange? But not quite?



After our rather varied day of snacks, Jojo made us a lovely dinner of undo noodles, tofu, peanut sauce, and pickled cucumbers.



And that was my last full day in Scotland. Sadly. Next post will be about flight and time in London. Which is fine, but not Scotland. Turns out I love Scotland. More than I love Seattle. Anyway, now my life goal is to move to Scotland.

Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Peps! Had a lovely time getting to know this girl.

Litha 2020 and Lammas 2021

The summer festival sabbats. That I marked with food, as I tend to.

Litha (aka Summer Solstice) (21st December 2020):

Normally I make a little menu plan to make something special for each sabbat. Litha 2020 I did not. It was less than a month after Dim Sim passed, and I was still deep in the extremely non-functional part of my depression and grief. In fact, I realised I didn't make any recipes for over a month. It was all about eating the easiest thing I could, and when (if?) I was actually hungry. Food for Litha tends to include red and yellow foods, bread, and fruit and vegetables. At that point, one thing I would eat fairy regularly was my 'depression sandwich', which was just bread with mayo, sliced tomato, and turmeric seasoning salt on it. I was also eating some apricots, because I love them and it was the season. And I was drinking a lot of juice, like this carrot, apple, and ginger juice. Turns out that this depression lunch worked out perfectly into Litha themes! How about that.



Lammas (2nd February 2021):

By Lammas I was starting to cook a bit more regularly again, if only to give me something to do. Lammas is the wheat harvest festival at the peak of summer, and foods typically include corn, grain, breads, seasonal fruits and veggies, and berries.

Quick Herb Bread from 1000 Vegan Recipes by Robin Robertson: I had briefly planned to spend my day making an elaborate and delicious looking braided yeast bread recipe that I saw on IG. But reality set in and I just did not have the spoons to deal with that. Instead I made this Quick Herb Bread. The original recipe calls for dried basil, thyme, and marjoram but I took the suggested variation of using celery seed and dried dill.... with a lot of extra dried dill. This ended up being a very dense loaf, almost more like damper (as Australian thing). Overall a bit meh. But it did the job.
Rating: :|



Corn Salad with Basil Pesto Aioli from Vegan Bowl Attack by Jackie Sobon: This seemed like a nice way to celebrate corn. I made a half recipe, but I still was a little low on corn so I added some white beans as well. A great addition! I also used celery instead of raw red onion. The basil pesto aioli was really lovely.
Rating: :)



I also served it with some grape tomatoes and sliced cucumber.



I went super easy for dessert, with a Nanna's Vegan Apple and Rhubarb Pie,some fresh blueberries, and some of the Pana Boysenberry Cheezecake ice cream I mentioned in my last post. I was planning on having fresh blackberries rather than blueberries, but just that week suddenly blackberries were no where to be found!



(% 1000 Vegan Recipes blogged: 29.9%)

VeganMoFo #18: Sydney - Saturday shindigs

Argh! Somehow yesterday totally slipped my mind for my blogging... I don't know how or why, I wasn't actually doing anything else really! And then I almost ran out of time today, so now I am posting late at night and tomorrow I shall have to post twice to make my 20 post quota!

Anyway, back to the happier times of Sydney. Saturday morning dawned and I was SO happy because I was finally going to have brunch at Naked Espresso! Then I was going to go to the Sydney Vegan Bakesale and meet Mandee and buy lots of food... or so I THOUGHT! Until I found out that some climate change protest had taken the spot and turned our bakesalers out... so they could make an ice sculpture and sell sausages!! *sigh* But, all was not lost! Read on...

We trundled on down to Naked Espresso to watch the lovely Leigh in action and order some fuds. Here is the list of breakfasts:


Brendan ordered the Builder's Breakfast, which is a joke Leigh suggested one fateful day that has since become a wildly popular brunch item. It is a pie (plain, mushroom or pepper) with a vanilla slice. Brendan had the pepper pie and I tried a wedge - delicious! Not sure how I feel about this first thing in the morning! (OK, I admit that my brunch wasn't actually first thing in the morning, I had had a pre-brunch breakfast before I left... I get really hungry you know... hee).


Diana ordered the Bacon, Lettuce, Avocacado and Tomato sandwich (BLAT), which is her favourite. Doesn't it look just great? The bacon is Redwoods.


I ordered the Aussie Feast, which was three slices of smoked tofu (I love smoked tofu), baked beans (not out of a can either - hurrah), has browns (mmm.... potato goodness), mushrooms (delicious), two slices of sourdough toast with Nuttelex and also some spinach, tomato and pumpkin. Hey, where are those last three?


Oh, there they are - they were under my bread! It is a great breakfast, everything is so tasty - nothing oily or bland here! But I was having one of my super hungry days because about 30 minutes later I was starting to feel peckish again!


Leish ordered The Morning After, which is the same as the Aussie Feast except that it has two Redwood sausages instead of the smoked tofu.

Now I mentioned that I was sad the bake sale was canceled as I was looking forward to meeting Mandee. However, Mandee wisely also had decided that brunch was an excellent plan!


A CupcakeKitteh and a dimsimkitty together at last! It is always great to meet people in the non-cyber world. :)


Mandee also very thoughtfully brought me some goodies from the bake sale! Gingerbread, Banana Split and Chocolate PB cupcakes! There was also a gingerbread horse, but his head fell off so I didn't photograph him in case it disturbed young children. All were DELICIOUS! Plus Mandee also got me onto some vegan 100s and 1000s, so now I've been eating fairy bread like it's going out of fashion!

After brunch we took a stroll around Newtown and then headed back to Di and Brendan's to get ready for their housewarming/Sydcoat shindig that night. The shindig was great, and I was able to catch up with even more Sydcoats and also a friend from work who moved to Sydney a while ago! Awesome.


The theme was BBQ, so us vegans had some Sanitarium sausages, marinated mushrooms and an awesome retro rice salad provided by the lovely Mim!


Leigh also brought some spare pies from work, and I had a mushroom one. Delicious! Alex, one of the omnis, liked them so much he took one home! And so the day ended on a glorious note of friends and food... bliss!

Cute Kitty Photo of the Post


The third cat of the Brendan/Di household is Wesley. He is younger than the others and is a real little scamp. His nickname is Kitten.

VeganMoFo 2016 #7: Hometown Heroes

7th: Close to Home – Make a food from your own country, state, or hometown.

Hello, and happy birthday to me! I am currently in Melbourne stuffing my face full of exciting food, which will have to wait until after VeganMoFo finishes to share it with you, but the food here is gooooood. So much to share!

But back to VeganMoFo. We are moving into International Week, but starting out with sharing some of our close to home favourites. In the past I have made Sausage Rolls, Lamingtons , and Fairy Bread, as well as the regular burgers, sausage sizzles, meat pies and so on. Plus a lot of Vegemite. And let's not forget the wonderful produce - bananas, mangoes, macadamias... it is coming into mango season right now and I can't wait!

Today I am taking a slight cheat, in that I didn't make the things in this post. I bought them from Brisbane's own vegan dessert bakery, Veganyumm. Because if there is one thing better than making and eating a local favourite food, it is buying a local favourite food from a local business that is doing wonderful things! I went there to buy these specifically for VeganMoFo as well, so there was some VeganMoFo effort involved.

First up, the Vegemite and Cheese scroll! Like a savoury cinnamon bun, with Vegemite and melty cheese on the inside instead of cinnamon sugar. I love Vegemite and Cheese together!



I also got an ANZAC biscuit. I love ANZAC biscuits, and this is one of the best I've had. It is my second favourite thing to get from Veganyumm (after their Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Bar). This biscuit is HUGE, and it just so delicious.



I am looking forward to seeing what local delights everyone else is sharing today! If there are any Australians reading this post, what are your favourite local foods?

Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Much to Dim Sim's disgust, she was not an only cat for long. Gizmo was four years old when I rescued her from being put down at a local vet clinic. I am so glad I did, because the time I was lucky enough to spend with her was amazing. She was amazing. Gizmo passed away four and a half years ago, and that loss still breaks my heart.