Dad's Birthday (Menu: Valentine's Day For Two from Chloe's Vegan Italian Kitchen)

Yesterday was my dad's birthday - happy birthday Dad! As always, I made a special dinner based on his request. He requested Italian (which he also requested last year), and like last year I turned to Chloe's Vegan Italian Kitchen (see my other posts about this book here). After presenting him with some options, he picked a pasta dish that belonged to the Valentine's Day For Two Menu, though obviously it can be made anytime and the recipes make enough for however many you wish. The one thing that we changed was the cake. The menu has a red wine chocolate cake, but he wanted an orange chocolate chip cake. And what the birthday person wants, the birthday person gets!

Paremsan Topping: This was the first thing I made, as it was a component of the vegetable side dish. This recipe is... weird. It is almonds, nutritional yeast, and salt processed up... fine. But then it has... maple syrup? As Food For Dissertating recently experienced with a maple syrup heavy mayo, maple syrup in parmesan doesn't belong. It was too weirdly sweet for me, but my mum really liked it!
Rating: :|



Paremsan Roasted Asparagus: The parmesan was to go on this. This recipe is simple and classic. Seasoned roasted asparagus topped with a squeeze of lemon and parmesan. Next time I would use a saltier parmesan!
Rating: :)



Pasta in Pink Sauce: This is a lovely pink sauce based on crushed tomatoes and cashew cream. I halved the recipe as I was cooking for three, using only 250g of bucatini. Because I had such a small amount of cashews and water to blend, and my blender is regular size, I did puree it with a bit of the crushed tomatoes so there would be some more liquid for the blender to work with (it is high powered, but itty bitty volumes in it don't go the best... I wish it had a mini jug as well!). This is really simple but really lovely, and I love the thickness of bucatini as well.
Rating: :)



Herbed Garlic Toast: I went a bit rogue with the bread on this one. Instead of using thinly sliced baguette, I used a thick slices of a mini wholemeal stone baked batard. I cut a slice for each of us, and I made a half batch of the topping which spread over this amount of bread nicely. Instead of raw garlic I used garlic powder, as my silly body can only deal with fresh garlic if it is well cooked. This also has some nutritional yeast in it. This is salty, cheesy, garlicky, herby goodness.
Rating: :D



And here it is, all plated up.



And now for the cake!

Orange-Chocolate Chip Bundt Cake from Isa Does It by Isa Chandra Moskowitz: This recipe calls for a 12-cup Bundt pan, but I only had a 6-cup ring pan. So I figured I'd halve the recipe so it didn't explode everywhere in the oven, which I did. But it ended up one very flat little doughnut looking cake. So I am guessing that I could have used the whole recipe with my cake tin and it would have ended up looking more like a cake, less like a cake-sized doughnut. Regardless, it pretty cute and tasted pretty amazing - a great orange flavour through the cake. To fancy it up a little as it was looking a little tiny, I added a quick marmalade glaze (just simmered some marmalade with a smidge of water for a few minutes and brushed it over the cake), and topped it with some grated orange-infused dark chocolate.
Rating: :)



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Dim Sim would like to remind you that after several posts of non-Dim Sim photos, she is still here and wishes to be adored. Here she is enjoying a little rest out in the cat max yesterday morning.