Recipe Round-Up: Vegan Desserts

Vegan Desserts by Hannah Kaminsky is an older book that has been sitting on my shelf for sometime. For some reason, I hadn't made anything from it! But that had to change. It has lovely and enticing photos, no surprise given Hannah's photography skills, and a range of delicious sounding recipes. A lot of these I made for bake sales, which are always great events to try out a bunch of fun baking recipes! The recipes are divided by season, with a final chapter for essentials at the back. This is my first round-up of this book, but I did post about one other recipe I made from it here.

Lemongrass Mac-Nut Blondies: These have a lovely subtle lemongrass flavour. The recipe says to chop the lemongrass as fine as possible, I just chopped small then blended with the milk to get it even finer without spending time and cutting fingers trying to get it super small. These baked up pretty tall and puffy, you can see the top cracked a bit, but they still look great and were are nice combination of flavours.
Rating: :)



Zesty Rhubarb Ripple Cake: I love rhubarb, and last spring was a great season for it. The rhubarb ripple is a lovely syrup made from simmering rhubarb (mine was frozen, and I also had a few strawberries I chucked in for fun) with sugar and water, which is then layered and swirled through a thick batter. While the batter has orange juice in it, I only realise after I made it that there was no orange zest in the recipe, although this was mentioned in the recipe introduction. I needed to give this cake an extra 10 minutes in my oven to cook. Just so you know, it rises a lot during cooking, so don't use a shallow pan!
Rating: :)



Mango Lassi Popsicles: I have a little ice block set with six small popsicle moulds, so I made a half batch of the recipe. This filled them all with a little extra left over, though you can just drink that like lassi so there is no waste! This is a very easy recipe, with only five ingredients. I used frozen mango because we had a very short mango season this year. These are a good snack, they are refreshing but also not too sweet.
Rating: :)



Cranberry Streusel Bars: OK, I loved these! A lovely tart cranberry filling, which is balanced by the sweet base and streusel. The filling calls for 3/4 cup of maple syrup, which is super expensive here, so I did use a recipe to make an extended maple syrup from another book to make it a bit more economical, topped up with a bit of pure maple syrup as well and a few drops of maple extract. These bars are very crumbly once you cut them, so a bit messy to eat, but absolutely delicious.
Rating: :D



Sweet Potato Casserole Cupcakes: To be honest, the idea of sweet potato casserole as seen on the Thanksgiving table isn't the most appealing to me. Being a very American thing, I didn't grow up with it, and no shade on people who do enjoy it! But I like the idea of it made into cupcakes. These cupcakes are baked with sweet potato puree. I blended my puree up with the milk and other wet ingredients to make sure it was perfectly smooth. It was a very thick batter, but it baked well and was not too dense. The maple frosting is very easy, and worked out to be pretty much the exact amount for the 12 cupcakes.
Rating: :)



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



These two cuties are adoption kitties Winnie and Doris. They were hand raised by one of the nurses, and it is sad that they don't have homes yet! This photo is taken through the kitten enclosure, they were sitting on the top of a cat scratching post having a good snuggle. Getting photos of them are hard, because when they are on the go they are ON THE GO!