Tea and Sympatico

There's been lots of baking going on in my house this week! After making 100 cakes for the LRM launch last Saturday I did a lot more baking for work. My lovely work colleagues donated money for baked goods and raised another $95 towards Hillary's Go Fund Me to get her rehoused and her cats back. If you've not donated yet and can spare a few quid to help a vegan blogger friend then please, please pop on over to the site and also please share it. She could do with one last boost to get to the target and the money will greatly help with getting her and the animals resettled. The Golden Vanilla Cupcakes from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World are always a winner and are a recipe that works really well to double up on to make a big batch. The Chocolate, Orange, Walnut brownies are the same ones that I made when I won the Bake-Off competition at work last year. They are the vegan brownie recipe I've found that tastes most like a non-vegan brownie with a perfectly...

I'm already loving what I've read of other people's posts for today. It's great to see what books and authors we have in common and to discover ones that are new to me. I've broken my post down a bit into favourite books for different type of vegan cooking. Let's start with baking. I wanted to include the Scoffer booklets partly as a shout out to the wonderful world of zines and DIY publishing and partly just because they are a great introduction to the world of vegan baking. They were written by Ronny who lives in my home town of Glossop and sold to raise funds for Animal Causes. Sadly The Cake Scoffer is now out of print but Return of The Cake Scoffer is still available and for the mere price of £1.50 you can get your hands on recipes such as Bakewell Slice, Chocolate Fudge Cake, Berry and Ginger Cheesecake and Chocolate Eclairs. If you ever come across a copy of the Cake Scoffer grab it as it contains the most amazing recipe for a four ingredient cheese...

As I've been living without most of my cookbooks bar three by Isa Chandra Moskowitz, her recipes have been featuring widely on the dinner table recently. This one is an old favourite that we had for the last Bank Holiday weekend. It's not the most photogenic of meals but it tastes amazing. The green stuff is Cavolo Nero and the orange stuff is mashed sweet potato with apple from Appetite For Reduction . This is topped by tofu baked in BBQ Pomegranate sauce from Vegan With A Vengeance . This sauce has been nicknamed Elvis BBQ sauce after the generous amounts of Peanut Butter it contains! This was an previously untried recipe from Appetite For Reduction that Matt whipped up on a day off. The 'meatballs' are made from tempeh and beans and baked in the oven. They were served in a classic home made tomato sauce with broccoli and lots of nooch. They were lovely, really nutty tasting.

Here's a mini round up of some recent nice eats. Since I've moved I now have a thirty minute train journey into Manchester. I'm enjoying the time to read but I've found getting up earlier means I'm not that hungry first thing. I've been having my breakfast once I get to work at 8. I spotted the other day that M and S had some new granolas. Out of the three in the range, one was sweetened with honey, one with sugar and the one that I chose with agave. It's really different from other granolas I've had. There's loads of crunchy seeds in it and I've been loving the flavour as well as the texture. It tastes delicious with M and S soya drink which is much sweeter and creamier than other brands and which is fab in coffee and hot chocolate too. I've been aware of Isa's recipe for Chickpea Picatta for a long time and remember bloggers raving about it when Appetite For Reduction  first came out. Somehow it had just never appealed to me tho...