When I first started this blog, I had every intention of getting into gluten-free baking as well as vegan. I somehow wandered too far over to the vegan side and now I have no desire to do gluten-free. I mean, let's face it; it's intimidating! There's about a billion types of non-wheat flours out there, all of which are extremely pricey, and the proportions of flours to binders (also equally expensive) blows my mind.
I'm starting to realize, however, that gluten-free is the newest diet craze, and that while vegan is unique, it's not as niche of a market as it was five years ago. Just yesterday, while at a farmers market, I was asked if any of my stuff was gluten-free by about four people! My lame answer was that I was working on a vegan and gluten-free recipe (even though that's a total lie!).
So I've been racking my brain to make something that's gluten-free, vegan, salable at a farmers market, AND somewhat inexpensive and easy to make. This is my first attempt, which I think is pretty good. I'll need to come up with a few more experiments before I start providing the masses with gluten-free goodies, though. If you have any suggestions or references on gluten-free, please leave them in the comments! Thanks!
Recipe below!!
Ingredients:
1 1/2 cup raw whole almonds 1 Tbsp chili powder 1/4 tsp cayenne 1/4 tsp nutmeg 1/2 tsp cinnamon 1/4 tsp black pepper 1 1/2 tsp salt 2 Tbsp olive oil 6 oz. chocolate
Directions:
Mix spices together in a medium bowl. Add olive oil and almonds. Stir until the almonds are coated. Pour into a baking sheet and bake at 350 for about 10 to 15 minutes, or until fragrant.
Let cool completely on the counter. Once cool, spread out on a sheet of wax paper.
In a small sauce pan, melt the chocolate over low heat, stirring constantly to keep the chocolate from burning. Drizzle over the cooled almonds, then sprinkle coarse sea salt over the top, if desired. Enjoy!
Yes, you heard right. Vegan ice cream smushed between two vegan cookies. I thought I would resume my regular posting with something outrageously awesome. You're about to get even more excited, because these aren't just vanilla ice cream with chocolate chip cookie sandwiches. This is three of the best flavors of all time put together into one dessert.
Check it: Banana ice cream with peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. It's a trifecta/love triangle/orgy of wonderful flavors! Also extremely easy to make!
You don't even need an ice cream maker to make this ice cream (although it speeds the process up just a tiny bit). All you need is a blender and a freezer. I'm at a loss for what to write, because I think these speak for themselves.
Recipe below!
Ingredients:
6 very ripe bananas
1 tsp agave nectar
1/2 cup vegan butter
1/2 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar, packed
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
1 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 1/4 cup flour
6 oz. chocolate chips
Directions:
If using an ice cream maker: Peel all the bananas. Place in a bowl and mash until a somewhat smooth paste is formed. Refrigerate for about an hour. Then put in ice cream maker along with agave nectar and let it do its thing. Freeze when it's done.
If not using an ice cream maker: Peel the bananas and then break into four pieces each. Freeze thoroughly. Once frozen, put in a blender with about 1/4 cup almond milk and agave nectar. Blend until smooth, then store in freezer.
To make cookies: Cream butter, peanut butter, and sugars together until smooth. Add the vanilla extract and apple cider vinegar and mix in. In a small bowl, sift together flour, baking soda, and baking powder. Add dry mixture to wet mixture. Stir together, then stir in chocolate chips. Drop by Tablespoon-full onto an ungreased baking sheet, then flatten out with your hand. Bake at 325 for about 11 to 12 minutes. Let cool completely.
Once the cookies are completely cool, scoop about 1/4 cup of ice cream onto the flat side of one of the cookies, then slap another one on top. Store in the freezer in an airtight container.
What you are about to see looks so simple, yet contains countless hours, LOTS of flour, too much money for my tiny wallet, a couple break-downs, and more pride than Simba ever saw. You know, because he's a lion, and lions gather in prides. Anywho, this is the set-up of my farmer's market table!
This has been a joint effort with my business partner, Mustafa. I can't even begin to tell you how crazy my life has been in the past couple weeks. Which is why, my dear readers, I haven't been posting delicious recipes for you to try, but I promise that will resume in the coming weeks. I went from daydreaming about getting paid to bake vegan confections while tirelessly, monotonously typing away, to actually having a business in which I do just that in just two short weeks. Craziness.
My partner makes salted caramels and brownies for the time being, but is expanding his line to other candies and other non-vegan delights. I am basically in charge of everything vegan (although on these signs I didn't have anything labeled as vegan since I wasn't sure how that would be receptive on the affluent side of town). Right now, I'm focusing on doughnuts, tarts, and cupcakes.
I've also become an expert on so many things I thought I would never care about, such as how to pick out the perfect boxes for your confections (and how to assemble those boxes once they arrive in a flat mass on your doorstep via the FedEx guy), how much one cup of flour costs, what font you want on your business card, and how to set up the table to lure people into looking more closely and what you have to offer.
Since I'm technically a real-live adult and am fairly self-sustaining, I haven't gotten to quit my typing-in-a-dungeon job yet. Starting a business, as I've come to find out, is not only expensive, but very time consuming, so I've been burning both ends of the candle the last few weeks. This came to a head on Friday, when I worked at the kitchen from 7:00am to 5:00pm and then at my paying job from 5:00pm until 11:30pm. I cried a little bit. 
So that's my long-winded excuse for not posting any recipes, but I promise I will. The super craziness is over for now. If you live in Gainesville, come out to the downtown farmer's market to support local food! It's on Wednesday evenings from 3:00pm until 7:00pm in the downtown plaza.
It's the beginning of February, and this can only mean one thing: strawberry season in Florida is so close I can barely contain myself! I bought a pint of strawberries for this recipe, and I'm lucky they lasted as long as they did in my fridge. I sat in bed last night watching Freaks and Geeks in my underwear and had some spare heavy cream sitting in the fridge, so decided to make whipped cream to go with some strawberries. I used up every last ounce of my will power to limit the amount of strawberries I could eat (which came out to a minescule three...yeah, my will power is pretty awesome). I went through all this so I could make these cupcakes for you guys :)
They are heavenly. It's as if the fruit goddess and the god of baked goods had a lovechild. My sacrifice last night could not have paid off any more than it did when I bit into these cupcakes. If there's only one recipe on this blog you decide to make, I would recommend it be this one. I would also recommend eating one while they're still somewhat warm!
I didn't want to load these down with frosting for fear it would take away from the natural goodness of the strawberries, so there's just a simple glaze on these. If you are frosting's all time, biggest, number one fan, you can put frosting on them, but I recommend letting the strawberries be the star of this one. Recipe below!
Ingredients:
2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup (1 stick) vegan butter
2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
2 tsp vanilla extract
splash of lemon juice
1 cup vanilla almond milk
1 pint strawberries, diced fairly small
1 cup powdered sugar
2 tsp almond milk
Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
In a small bowl, mix the dry ingredients together.
In a medium bowl, cream and butter and sugar together. Add the apple cider vinegar, vanilla extract, and lemon juice. Stir to combine. Add the flour mixture and stir until combined. Add the almond milk and mix until a uniform batter forms.
Stir in the strawberries. Then pour into a greased muffin tin so all 12 compartments are equally filled. Bake for abou 25 minutes, or until toothpick inserted in the middle of each cupcake comes out clean.
Let cool in pan for abou 15 minutes. Then transfer to cooling rack to finish cooling.
To make the glaze, combine the powdered sugar and almond milk. Stir until a paste is formed. If it's too stiff (i.e. not all the sugar can be dissolved) then add more almond milk by the 1/2 tsp. Remember, a little bit of liquid goes a VERY long way with powdered sugar. If it's too runny (i.e. it looks like soup), then add more powdered sugar by the Tbsp until a glue-like consistency is reached.
Drizzle the glaze over each cupcake and let it run down the sides. It will harden after a while. Consume immediately because you just can't wait any longer!
While at work today, I came up with an idea of making pomegranate cupcakes. In my head, they looked something like the above; a dark, rich pomegranate cake topped with a light vanilla frosting. As you will come to find out, this is not what I ended up with. The end product from this kitchen adventure turned out to be this: 
Yeah, I know. It looks like dog dookie in a really awesome vintage souffle bowl. But it's actually my version of bread pudding: vegan chocolate bread pudding. Now, how did I go from a light and fruity cupcake to a rich, heavy, chocolate dessert? Well, I will tell you.My first mistake was to think that the wonderful color of pomegranate juice would translate in the cupcake batter. When I mixed it in, instead of turning the batter into this awesome magenta color like I thought it would, it turned kind of gray-ish brown. I'm still not even sure why/how that happened.
The second mistake I made was to think I could substitute all the liquid in my cupcake recipe that's usually almond milk for Pom juice. Well, I'm not a chemist, but I now know that something in the almond milk has a binding effect on the batter, and without it, it turns out looking like this:
Now, being the eternal optimist that I am, I thought that even if they weren't that pretty, that maybe if they tasted good enough I could convince you, the reader, that this was the perfect dessert to make, so long as you weren't giving them out to dinner guests and feeling your self-esteem crumble along with the cupcakes in their hands. But when I tasted them, there was nothing special about them. Not a terrible taste by any means, but it was plain Jane. 
Either the crumbling or the plain taste alone I could have put up with, but since the two of them were holding hands and sticking their tongues out at me together, I had to come up with something totally different. I lost no time.
I crumbled all the cupcakes into my souffle bowl (not that hard of a task!), but then was stuck on what I should add to the crumbled mess. That is, I was stuck until I thought of what makes EVERYTHING better....chocolate! So I quickly got to work making a liquidy chocolate sauce that would firm up in the oven just enough.
This called for some egg replacer, which as an aside, I want to know when the heck this packaging was designed, 1974? I bought this not that long ago, but every time I look at it, I am transported to the '70s. Which is not a bad thing.
I ended up with this delicious, molten, sticky, chocolatey, warm, gooey mess. Not the prettiest thing in the world, but a seriously good comfort food! Recipe below.
Ingredients:
2 cups flour
3/4 tsp salt
1 1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 cup vegan butter
1 cup sugar
4 tsp apple cider vinegar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup Pom juice
1 cup almond milk
1/2 cup vegan butter
5 oz. semi-sweet chocolate
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
3 tsp egg replacer
2 tsp vanilla extract
Directions:
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
In a small bowl, sift together flour, salt, and baking soda.
In a medium bowl, combine sugar, vegan butter, apple cider vinegar, and vanilla extract until smooth. Add the flour mixture and combine until well incorporated. Stir in the Pom juice until the batter looks somewhat uniform.
Pour into a greased muffin tin and bake for about 19 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the middle of each cupcake comes out clean.
Let cool in the tin, then, using a spoon, scoop out and put into a casserole dish and crumble finely with the spoon. Set aside.
Meanwhile, in a heavy-bottomed sauce pan, combine almond milk, vegan butter, chocolate and apple cider vinegar. Heat over low heat, stirring often to prevent the chocolate from burning. Meanwhile, in a small bowl, whisk together 3 tsp of egg replacer with 4 Tbsp of water.
Once the chocolate and almond milk mixture has melted completely and is combined, stir in the egg replacer mixture and vanilla extract. Whisk well. You will start to feel it gelling fairly soon after you add this.
Pour over crumbled cupcakes and stir to cover all the crumbles with the chocolate mixture. Bake at 350 for about 15 minutes. Let cool and enjoy immediately.
