Meals for Mum (Mother's Day and Mum's birthday 2016)

I'm a little behind in sharing specials meals that I made for special people. In this post, it will be about the meals I made for my mum last year for mothers day and also for her birthday.

First up, Mother's Day! This was a pretty fun meal. Mum loves baked beans, so I knew from the moment I saw the main recipe that I was going to make it for her sometime. She also requested a chocolate lava cake, which led to some fun times in the kitchen. Here's what we had!

Open Sesame Dressing from Blissful Bites: I made a half batch of this creamy dressing, and served it as a dip. It strangely calls for arrowroot, even though you don't heat anything to thicken it, so I just left that out. I served this with some Beanfields BBQ chips and some carrot and celery sticks.
Rating: :)



Maple-Baked Beans & Cornbread Casserole from But I Could Never Go Vegan: Unfortunately, the ratios for this seemed to be a bit out. I ended up with a very thick cornbread layer on top of an almost minimal layer of beans. I would consider making it in a smaller dish with only half the amount of cornbread for a better ratio. That is nothing against the cornbread though, it was a lovely light and fluffy one (I used a blend of half whole spelt and half AP flour in place of the whole wheat pastry flour). Also, this claims to serve 12 to 14, but really it serves about 6.
Rating: :)





Chocolate Molten Lava Cakes with Raspberry Sauce from Chloe's Kitchen: Thankfully these tasted good, because they did not hold their shapes once they plopped out of their molds. Also, it was hard to unmold, because everything was very hot and it was hard to get a good grip with oven mitts on. And then they just kind of collapsed on themselves, though didn't actually split. The chocolate chips also kind of spread a bit with baking, so they had more of a centre ooze than a lava flow. But the good thing is, they tasted great! The recipe says to store the raspberry sauce in the fridge once made, but mine set up like a gel when I did that and I had to reheat it again.
Rating: :)



Her birthday is later in the year, and this year we had my brother home from the UK as well! She requested a fairly light dinner, with cake of course.

Edamame-Mint Hummus from The Superfun Times Vegan Holiday Cookbook: I made a half recipe of this refreshing dip, which gave me about 1.5 cups (the recipe says a whole batch makes 4 cups, so mine came out a bit under expected). This dip is lovely, creamy and fresh, plus very pretty. I left out the chile flakes, and added a bit of extra mint. It says to serve with pita points, but I served it with cucumber slices and it was just delightful.
Rating: :)



Miso-Glazed Eggplant from Chloe's Kitchen: This interpretation of nasu dengaku is a little on the sweet side, but still very pleasant. I used 5 eggplants to get the one and a half pounds (the recipe saus 3 will give you this), and I doubled the sauce because Mum likes a lot of sauce. We had these with sushi rice, baby spinach, and broccoli.
Rating: :)





Dark Chocolate Fudge Cake with Fudge Frosting from Chloe's Vegan Desserts: This is meant to be a double layer cake, but I just made it as one layer for a more manageable amount (this is a lesson we learned during with my Dad's birthday cake... that story to come in a later post). The cake has coffee in it, but as I am not a caffeine person (or a coffee taste person) I used some weak decaf, and I also added 1/2 tsp of chocolate extract. The cake was good, I liked it. The problem was that the frosting was just way too sweet for me. It has melted chocolated in it, and I used 70%, so a darker chocolate may help with that, but there is so much icing sugar in it. Not for me. However, my mum loved it. So if you like icing, you'll be right. You do need to let the frosting set a little bit before putting it on the cake, or it is too oozy (the recipe says to apply immediately before it sets at all).
Rating: :)



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Mum used to love giving Sahara her bear hugging cuddle walks, and Sahara was a big fan of it as well. Miss those walks with her.