Granola Round-Up

How about another crunchy granola round-up. It's been a while since I've made any, I've been leaning towards the much easier option of buying some, but here are some really fun flavours I made last year. Pretty much all of these were served over some sort of soy, almond, or cashew yoghurt and sometimes I added fresh fruit if I had some around.

Pecan-Sweet Potato Granola from Sweet Potato Soul by Jenne Claiborne: This granola is delicious! Though the sweet potato flavour in it, coming from grated sweet potato, is fairly subtle. It has both brown sugar and maple syrup in it, putting it on the sweeter side of granolas, but it has a bunch of cinnamon to make it warming and welcoming. I found out as I was making it that I didn't have quite enough pecans for the recipe, so I topped it up with some pepitas.
Rating: :D



Homemade Granola from Chloe's Vegan Desserts by Chloe Coscarelli: This is in the dessert for breakfast chapter, but even with a hefty amount of maple syrup is more a traditional granola rather than anything particularly desserty. I have seen recipes for ones with chocolate chips and marshmallows in other places! But this recipe is super easy, can be scaled up or down, and tastes great. As well as oats it has almonds cinnamon. It called for raisins as the fruit, but I don't love raisins so I used a mix of sultanans and cranberries instead.
Rating: :)



Stove Top Granola from Forks Over Knives The Cookbook by Del Sroufe: I hadn't made granola not in the oven before. This method was easy, however it didn't crisp up the way it does in the oven and while it was yummy, it was also very sticky! It uses date molasses as the sweetener and binder here, which was lovely and not too sweet. Surprising, given how sweet dates themselves are! I used a blend of mixed fruit (like for Christmas cakes) and cranberries. I made 1/3 of a recipe for 3 serves.
Rating: :)



Chai-Spiced Almond Granola from The Easy Vegan Cookbook by Kathy Hester: This granola uses a lovely mix of spices to give it a warming glow. It uses a combination of flax-seed mixed with water and oil to bind it together. They call for coconut oil, gross, I used canola oil instead. The mix of the spices and crunchy almonds makes it a lovely way to start the day.
Rating: :)



Sesame-Apricot Granola from Vegan Bowl Attack by Jackie Sobon: I just realised this is a recipe from a bowl cookbook but it is the only one I photographed not in a bowl! Ha. This is a really nice combination, with a mix of oats, buckwheat, coconut flakes, almonds, apricots, and seeds (including sesame seeds and chia seeds... I could do without the latter in there, they were weird). All coated in a tahini mixture. I had to add a smidge of hot water to my tahini mix to get it thin enough to be able to stir through and coat everything. I also had to bake it for slightly longer in my oven. It came out in wonderful crunchy crumbles! I made a whole recipe, which said it served 6 but really makes 3 generous serves.
Rating: :)



Homemade Hippie Cereal from Minimalist Baker's Everyday Cooking by Dana Shultz: This is a combination of granola mixed with puffed rice cereal. The granola part is gluten free, so no oats. It is all based on a mix of nuts (I used almonds and pecans) and seeds... including chia seeds again. I just really only like them under specific circumstances. I also added some raw sunflower seeds to the first baking stage, rather than adding rosated ones later on. It also has dried blueberries, and I added extra cinnamon as well. Confession time: I forgot to set a timer for this after I put it in my oven, so it baked for however long it took for the lovely smell to remind me that I had something in there! But it all worked out well. Once cooled, you mix it with the rice cereal. It is pretty fun to eat!
Rating: :)



Crunchy Citrus Toasted Granola from Cooking With Kindness (Edgar's Mission): A bright and tangy take on granola, using orange, lemon, and lime zest in mix. I made a half recipe for this, and used a blend of rolled oats and rolled rye. It also has coconut flakes, almonds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, dried dates, and dried apricots. I left out a the linseeds (aka flaxseeds) and the dried figs (I don't like figs), and I used canola oil instead of coconut. Served with some orange segments, it was a refreshing start to the day.
Rating: :)

Recipe Round-Up: The Easy Vegan Cookbook

Generally these days I stay away from more 'basic' vegan cookbooks. Not a slight on them, I just have so many cookbooks now that I don't really need the same recipes over and over again, I look for something with a bit of a different take. But I saw some reviews on other blogs about The Easy Vegan Cookbook by Kathy Hester and it looked like it had some interesting recipes. Though once I got it, I found it hard to get inspired and I didn't anything for ages. I have made a few things, and there are definitely some more I want to make. I haven't done a round-up from this book before, but I did make some blondies from it for a bake sale once.

Maple Walnut Sausage Patties: Breakfast sausage isn't really a thing here in Australian (sausages at breakfast, yes, but not in the US sense). So this recipe is actually really handy as a fast way to make some breakfast sausage patties. I wanted them for some breakfast sandwiches, and a 1/2 recipe made three biscuit-sized patties. The recipe says it makes 16 sausage patties, so I imagine they must be very small. These were fairly sweet, so you may want to cut down on the maple a smidge.
Rating: :)



Mapo Tofu: I had some leftover silken tofu to use up, so I made a half batch of this recipe. Of course, I cut way back on anything spicy to just a teeny smidge of sriracha. Although I made a reduced amount of the solid ingredients, I still made the full recipe of the sauce because I like things saucy. This sauce was really lovely, tangy, and gingery. Served with some rice and baby spinach, I got two serves.
Rating: :)



Broccoli with Spicy Garlic Sauce: This vegetable based stir-fry claims to serve four, but I got only two serves from it over rice. I added some cashews as well, and I think some tofu would be a great addition. I made the sauce not spicy by leaving out the chili flakes. The sauce was a little sweet because of this, so I might decrease the amount of agave if you are taking this route, but it was nice and made plenty.
Rating: :)



Ann's Vegetable Fried Rice with Tofu: The reason this looks so dramatically dark is because I used dark soy sauce, which made everything very very moody. But it was still a delightful dinner. I used brown basmati rice as my base, as that is what I had leftover from another dinner. I replaced the capsicum with grated carrot, and used 2 packs of the Soyco Japanese marinated tofu that I love. I also cooked the scallions with the onion rather than adding at the end, as raw scallions don't always suit my tummy.
Rating: :)



Veggie Quinoa Drop Biscuits: When life gives you leftover quinoa, make biscuits. This recipe calls for 1/2 cup of either vegan butter, shortening, or coconut oil. I used a jar of vegan onion lard (that didn't have any coconut oil) that I got from a Cruelty Free Shop mystery box for this, as I needed somewhere to use it. These biscuits are very tasty, but also quite soft (maybe because of the lard?). I also froze some of them and, after defrosting, reheated them at 180dC in the oven for 20 minutes and then they went very crunchy!
Rating: :)



Pecan Coconut Chocolate Chip Bars: I made these fun bars for a bake sale. The recipe calls for 1/2 cup melted coconut oil, or apple puree for an oil free option. I used slightly less than 1/2 cup of canola oil (mainly because I couldn't be bothered melting down margerine). The recipe calls for whole-wheat pastry flour, which can be hard to find here, so I used a mix of wholemeal spelt and regular plain white flour. The batter has pecans, chocolate chips, and shredded coconut mixed through it (I added some extra coconut). While I do have a mixer, which the recipe is written for, I did it by hand and it was easy and fine. I did need to bake it for an extra 5-10 minutes, though that is not unusual in my oven.
Rating: :)



Applesauce Spice Cake: I made this for some work snacks. The batter, which includes a hefty amount of applesauce as well as a lovely mix of spices, tasted amazing! Unfortunately this was lost a bit once it was baked. It was still good, but I expected more from the batter. I didn't have a 9 inch cake pan, so I used an 8 inch one. I was expecting it to rise a lot, as the recipe calls for a tall pan, but it didn't rise much at all and was quite dense.
Rating: :)



Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Dim Sim had surgery yesterday. Last week she had her senior check and vaccination. Thankfully her blood results came back showing that her kidney disease is pretty stable, but she had two skin lumps and cytology on one came back as a mast cell tumour. Yesterday she was the bravest girl, and had them removed with just sedation and a local anaesthetic. Hopefully the results will come back from the lab showing clean margins, otherwise she will need to have a full GA to cut out more. So fingers crossed!

Animal Lib QLD Bake Sale at The Green Edge

On Sunday I organised another bake sale for Animal Lib QLD, held once again at The Green Edge. This time we had several volunteers baking for us as well, which was wonderful! Of course, I baked a lot of things as well because I am a panic bake sale baker.

Because I live on the edge, I make a lot of new and never before made recipes for the bake sale. So here's the new things I tried.

Gluten-Free Blueberry Muffins from Keep It Vegan by Aine Carlin: I made a double batch of these (a single batch makes six) for the GF table. These large muffins are based on chickpea flour, ground almonds and desiccated coconut and are sweetened with a lot of maple syrup (making them a bit more expensive to make than I realised). They are also loaded up with blueberries. Aine recommends leaving them at least a day before eating. They were lovely. Very moist, so many blueberries. I used the applesauce option instead of banana for them. I also needed to bake for an extra 20 minutes.
Rating: :)



Rum and Raisin Gluten-Freedom Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero: Another GF offering. I used the Chocolate GF Cupcake from VCTOTW as my base, but the rum and raisin was my own inspiration. I added rum extract and raisins to the batter, and topped them with the ganache recipe from the book but with some more rum extract added.
Rating: :)



Chloe's Award-Winning Chocolate orange Cupcakes with Candied Orange Peel from Chloe's Vegan Desserts by Chloe Coscarelli: You can see the tragedy that befell these cupcakes - the ganache went grainy. It was a very sad moment, because I put a lot of work into them. But I didn't have time or ingredients to make more, and it still tasted OK, so I had to settle for ugly cupcakes. I think it was the coconut milk and melting the chocolate with it in the microwave? Anyway. These are chocolate orange cupcakes, filled with an orange buttercream (I ended up with half of this left over), topped with chocolate orange ganache and decorated with candied orange peel. I am not a fan of making candy things, even though they were pretty. It was a hot and sticky mess, and I burnt my finger. Which made the ganache fiasco all the sadder. Still, they tasted good!
Rating: :) even with the crappy ganache



Peanut Butter and Banana Cupcakes with Peanut Buttercream from Cookin' Crunk by Bianca Phillips: Technically these should be peanut banana cupcakes, as there is no peanut butter in the batter, instead there are crushed peanuts. I needed to bake these cupcakes for nearly an hour (rather than 25 minutes) to get the toothpick to come out clean (it wasn't just the banana, it tasted like raw batter still). The long baking time coupled with them being oil free meant they were a bit on the dense side, but tasted great. And that was balanced out by huge mounds of peanut buttercream frosting.
Rating: :)



My Favourite Maple Walnut Blondies from The Easy Vegan Cookbook by Kathy Hester: These were a little perplexing as there was no baking powder or soda in the recipe. The description does say that they are impossibly fudgelike, but I added 1/4 tsp of baking powder just to give them a little bit of rise. I also added a few drops of maple extract, which along with the maple syrup gave them a very strong maple flavour. The recipe called for melted coconut oil, but I used melted Nuttelex. And I also used brown sugar for coconut sugar and a mix of 2/3 AP flour and 1/3 whole spelt flour instead of whole-wheat pastry flour.
Rating: :)



Macadamia and White Chocolate Crispy Treats (with Strawberry) from 500 Vegan Recipes by Celine Steen and Joni Marie Newman: I don't like white chocolate, and had a block of white chocolate with strawberry chunks that I got in a mystery box. So using it to make something for a bake sale seemed sensible. These cripsy treats set up and held together perfectly! Because there were some strawberry chunks in the chocolate (which was melted, but the chunks remained), I added 1 tsp of strawberry extract to give the whole thing a strawberry theme. I was not a huge fan, just because of my white chocolate issues, but everyone else said they were good!
Rating: :) (based on other people's reviews)



And I of course made my two bake sale regulars. Berry Patch Brownies (from Let Them Eat Vegan by Dreena Burton) and Soulhaus Cookies (from Great Gluten-Free Vegan Eats by Allyson Kramer).





Bec, who is on the committee of ALQ and was my co-baker for the bake sale we did earlier this year, focused her efforts on making nearly 100 cinnamon rolls!! They are always a big hit. Bec is about to leave us for 6 months to go and study at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York! I am very envious, and can't wait to see what she is bringing to bake sales once she gets back!



And of course we had several other great bakers! Here's what they brought.

Peanut Butter Oreo Brownies and Carrot & Walnut Cake.



Oreo and Strawberry Glazed Doughnuts.



Brownies.



Chocolate Cupcakes, Banana Bread, Banana & Strawberry Muffins.



Gluten-Free Fluffernutters. These are PB cookies with aquafaba marshmallow fluff in the middle! It was my first time eating aquafaba anything. I am behind the times. I still haven't made anything with it yet. It was good!



Oreo and Strawberry Frosted Vanilla Cupcakes.



Chocolate Cupcakes with Peanut Butter Icing and Caramel Drizzle.



Gingerbread Cupcakes.



Mini custard tarts. We popped several of these straight in our mouths to sustain us.



Savoury Faux Lox Filos. These were filled with a carrot-based salmon and creamy bechamel sauce. I bought a couple to heat up and have for lunch afterwards. YUM! I love good savoury options.



The Gluten-Free Table.



The Gluten-Full Table.



All the tables, full of food!



We raised over $1500, which will go towards ALQ's campaigns (including Greyhound Racing, Ditch Dairy, and Rethink Rodeos). So grateful to everyone who baked and everyone who came!

Cute Kitty Photo of the Post



Sunday was also Sahara's 15th birthday, as I mentioned in my last post. I made broccoli for dinner so she could have a little bit. She is mad for broccoli, but can't have it much because she has IBD. But she got a few pieces for her birthday. Of course, the pieces I put in her bowl were not as interesting to her as the pieces that were on my plate. This is her 'GIVE ME YOUR BROCCOLI' face.