Vegan Pumpkin Pie Cheesecake

I've been meaning to make this pie since, man, something like 2008, when my then-roommate, Muckford, made it for the first time. WOW, that was good cake. I've taken his recipe and published it here, with a few alterations.

I'll be honest; Muckford's was WAY better. Sadly, I don't know what he did to make it better, but I'm guessing it's because he's simply a good baker. Baking does not come as naturally to me as other culinary skills, although I do a great job of faking it. :-)

V e g a n  P u m p k i n  P i e  C h e e s e c a k e

Ingredients:
8 ounces Tofutti Better Than Cream Cheese - Look for the non-hydrogenated version in the yellow container.
12 ounces light firm silken tofu - Or extra-firm
1/2 cup agave nectar - Or unrefined sugar, which is what I used
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

1/2 cup pumpkin puree - Canned, not pumpkin pie mix
2 teaspoons rum - Optional. I used it. Not sure what it added.
3 tablespoons brown sugar or natural, unrefined sugar - I used the latter
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1/4 teaspoon grated fresh nutmeg - I wish I'd used this! I used dried, ground nutmeg, instead.

1 pre-made 8-inch graham cracker crust

Preheat the oven to 350F.

Put the first set of ingredients (toffuti through vanilla) in a food processor and puree until completely smooth. It should be silky smooth--not chalky or lumpy.

Remove a cup of this mixture from the processor and spread it in the bottom of the crust.

Add the next set of ingredients (pumpkin through nutmeg) to the ingredients remaining in the food processor and process until well blended. Smooth it carefully over the white layer in the crust, heaping it slightly in the middle. Bake until the center is almost set, about 50-60 minutes. Insert a toothpick. If it comes out liquidy and cold, give it more time, until the center is firm. Remove from the oven and allow to cool. Refrigerate until completely chilled, at least 3 hours. Serve to delighted guests.

Vegan MoFo! Post #4: Raw Vegan Ice Cream at Home for PENNIES!

That's right. Forget about that $6.99 raw vegan grocery store-bought stuff. You can make it at home for WAAAY cheaper! 

About a year ago, I wrote about making raw vegan ice cream out of frozen bananas using the idea I'd read about on Choosing Raw. This stuff is amazing. Seriously, if you've never tried this before, YOU MUST TRY IT RIGHT NOW. It's everything you could want in a homemade ice cream recipe - fast, easy, cheap, healthy, versatile, and delicious. Oh, and kind of magical.

Anyway, this recipe is a staple of my own personal Barebones Vegan Kitchen, and yet I'd never paused to snap a photo of the finished product - until now.

The frozen banana chunks being whipped into ice cream by the food processor.

The final product. Kinda looks like ice cream, right?

And now you have photographic evidence.

Here's what I do:

Ingredients:
-A bunch of bananas

(yeah, that's it.)

Chop each banana into quarters (or whatever) and freeze them. You'll probably want to keep them in the freezer for at least 8 hours, if not longer. I like to keep mine in a re-usable plastic container to keep them from freezer burn.

When the bananas are frozen solid, put them in a food processor and process them until they form a custard-y, creamy texture. You may be tempted to add water at first, but trust me, just let them do their magic. :-)

Eat plain or top with melted vegan chocolate, melted peanut butter, chopped mango, coconut shreds...whatever you love!

Nanny Foodchain's Tarallucci Cookies! My FAVORITE

Like, oh my god, my favorite cookies ever were the ones my late Grandmother ("Nanny") used to make every xmas. She called them "tattalouch" but I think the more widely-known name is "tarralucci." Let's call them that so that people searching the vast interweb can find this recipe.

I've been wanting to resurrect this recipe for a few years now, but as the original recipe was not vegan, I knew it'd be a challenge. I also knew I could do it, and this year, I did. So here you go, the veganized version of Nanny Foodchain's "tattalouch"/tarralucci cookies.

N a n n y  F o o d c h a i n ' s  T a r r a l u c c i  C o o k i e s   O M G  M y  F a v o r i t e  E v e r 

Dough Ingredients:

5 cups flour
6 tsp of Ener-G Egg Replacer + 8 TB of water, thoroughly mixed together
1/2 cup vegetable shortening
1/2 cup Earth Balance
1 cup unrefined sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup vanilla soy milk
1 tsp lemon extract (a little more if you're feeling lucky, or use lemon zest if you're feeling fancy)
1 tsp vanilla

Icing Ingredients:

1 cup powdered sugar that's not processed through bone char
However much vanilla soy milk it takes to make the mixture into a pasty liquid
1 tsp lemon extract

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. After you mix the dough ingredients together, flour your hands, then take a chunk at a time and roll it between your hands until it forms a log. You'll want the log to be roughly the size of a small dog's turd. Think maybe the size of the turd of, say, a 2-month old Pitbull puppy named Sprinkles at a kill-facility. Once you have your log, twist it into a little, swirly pile. Repeat this process until you have no more dough.

Bake for roughly 10 minutes. Maybe more. The bottom of each "pile" should be golden brown around the outside. The insides will be cake-like.

Don't wait for the cookies to cool. Take your icing mixture and spoon it over each cookie. If you want, decorate by sprinkling Florida Crystals or some other form of vegan sprinkles on top. Hey, adopting Sprinkles is vegan, by the way.


Another hey, sometimes Nanny Foodchain liked to dye the dough red and green. You could probably get yourself just a little beet juice and dye the dough a nice pink OR red. Not sure if food coloring is vegan. I haven't used it in years. Anyone know?

I just want to bite into that lemony, vanillay, cakey goodness.

Swirly piles!!!!

haaaaaay.

And did you know these cookies are famous now?

Vegan MoFo! Post #10: Banana Oatmeal Chocolate Carob Walnut Cookies

Hey folks, I'm catching up on my MoFo posts! I'm not going to enter the contest for posting every day, but I want to live up to my promise of posting at least 22 posts this month.

Without further ado, I will share with you this delicious recipe. It's the one that I was talking about in the previous post. As I said before, I must give credit to one of my former roommates, Muckford, for finding the majority of this recipe.

B a n a n a  O a t m e a l  C h o c o l a t e  C a r o b  W a l n u t  C o o k i e s

Ingredients:

1 cup margarine, cold
1 1/2 cups tightly packed brown sugar 
1 cup non-refined sugar
1 large (or 2 small), ripe, mashed banana
4 teaspoons vanilla
2 tablespoons water or soy/almond/rice milk
2 cups all-purpose or whole-wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 1/2 cups rolled oats
1 1/2 cups vegan chocolate chips
1 cup carob chips
3/4 cup chopped walnut pieces

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Beat together the margarine and sugars. Electric mixers are unnecessary - you can just use a fork or some other utensil! Add the well-mashed banana and mix well, then add the vanilla, then the water. The water will try to separate; keep mixing with a figure-eight motion and add the dry ingredients, in the order above, bit by bit.

The final batter should be almost too dry to hold the chocolate chips. If the batter is too wet, add a little more flour + oats or else the cookies will turn out hard and flat. Put big gobs of batter onto an uncreased cookie sheet. You want these cookies to be kind of gigantic, trust me.

Bake them for 10 or 12 minutes. Cook them longer if you prefer a hard cookie, but be aware that bananas only approximate the action of an egg in the mix, and you can get cookies as hard as the cookie sheet if you aren't careful.

Let them congeal on the sheet for a moment after removing them from the oven, then cool on a plate or a wire rack. Store in an air-tight container. They taste even better after they sit overnight or in the fridge.

I have taken these cookies so many places and I can say, both vegans and omnivores alike have raved about them! They appeal to those without much of a sweet tooth, and also seemed to be the most popular cookie at Bitchcraft last week.

Sadly, I do not have a photo of these...They just get eaten that quickly. ;) Here's a cute photo of my boyfriend's dog instead. Enjoy!

Nico Puppins at her favorite dog park, waiting oh-so-patiently for my boyfriend to throw her ball.

Vegan MoFo! Day 9: A review of last wkend's Bitchcraft Trading Post!

As I mentioned in this recent post, last weekend I sold my hand-made vegan accessories at the first ever "Bitchcraft Trading Post" event!

Basically, Bitchcraft Trading Post is a collection of Los Angeles-based artists (some professional, some not; some starving, some not) who live in the LA area and know each other. We wanted to have a FREE event where we could sell our stuff without having to pay the huge fee that we would've paid in order to sell at the typical local art fair (ya'll know how I love DIY stuff).

As many of you already know, chooseyourownfoodchain also has a small vegan 'biz called "foodchain." The business consists of...me...and I make and sell jewelry, re-usable lunchbags, totes, clothing, and more. I make my stuff with only VEGAN materials, so NO fur, feathers, ivory, shell, wool, leather, etc. I also try to use recycled materials as much as possible.

A close-up of one of the reusable lunchbags I sold. Designed and hand-stitched by yours truly. The felt is made of recycled materials, and some of the brown you see is actually from an old skirt I cut up.

I didn't just sell my vegan goods last weekend - I also did something I've been wanting to do for ages: I gave out FREE vegan baked goods. I whipped up about eight dozen vegan cookies and a dozen or so vegan cupcakes, and arranged them next to the stuff I was selling with a sign saying "FREE vegan cookies & cupcakes!"

Why did I do this? Well, it wasn't just a marketing gimmick - I really wanted to show people that vegan food can be AMAAAAZINGLY tasty. I knew that if I charged money for these treats, I wouldn't reach as many people, so I gave them away fo' free. Most people were sort of shy about taking free food, given that pretty much nothing is free these days... One very kind woman even insisted on paying me $1 for a cookie. 

By the end of that day's Bitchcraft event, most of my baked goods had been eaten. Of course, I told *everyone* who ate one that they were vegan, and explained that "vegan" meant that I'd made them without milk, butter, eggs, cream, or any other animal-derived ingredient. Some people who ate these had never tried a vegan baked good before. I like to believe that I accomplished my goal of turning some people on to the idea that "vegan" does not have to equal bland. Happy sigh. True to the Vegan MoFo spirit.

My foodchain table.

Let's talk about the food. Here's a list of the treats I made:

1. Lemon Icebox Cookies
I found this online recipe for raw lemon cookies and decided to give it a go. Loved these! They're basically lemon zest, raw cashews, and agave nectar, so you can eat them for breakfast OR as a treat. My only problem was that I couldn't get them to keep well unless I kept them in the freezer at all times.

2. Banana Oatmeal Chocolate Carob Walnut Cookies
Thank you, Muckford, for providing the basis of this recipe. I've only tweaked it a little bit. 

3. CYoFC-Approved Chocolate Chip Cookies
As I've said, I'm not a huge chocolate chip cookie lover, so I invented a kind that I *do* love.

4. Pumpkin Cookies
These are an all-time favorite of mine. I make them every fall, at least once.

5. Coconut Cupcakes (recipe from Vegan With A Vengeance)
This was my first time making these. Oh my god. They're delectable. Very creamy, and not overly coconut-y. I topped mine with store-bought coconut shavings. Vegan Cupcakes 4 LFE!

The coconut cupcakes, in all their delicious, vegan glory.

The event overall was a HUGE success, too. There were art-makers, there were pizza-makers, there were sangria-makers, there were merry-makers. There were also quite a few people who brought their cute puppies along.

Let's talk about the other vendors.

There were about 20 of them. People were selling potted plants, hair accessories, paintings, vintage items, silk-screened posters, candles, jewelry, mulled cider, pizza, ties, etc. Allison Davidson was selling her photography, Oh Boy Cat Toy was selling buttons, beer kozies, vegan cat toys, "fake messes," and postcards, Lori Jackson was selling potted plants, Rachel Pitler was selling her paintings, Monica Katzenell was selling her silk-screened posters...

...Mignonne was selling hand-stitched baby onesies, Ryn Rina was there selling felt hair accessories, Molly Sullivan was selling vintage purses. Mystic Pizza was selling vegan and other pizza (Mystic Pizza is a covert, one-man operation, making and selling pizzas from his home near Silver Lake/Los Feliz...you can find him @mysticpizzala on Twitter ).  This is just a sampling - let me know if you'd like to be listed or linked to! 

For more info about my tiny, one-woman vegan business, aka "foodchain," click on the "Merch" page at the top, or go directly to my etsy site.

peace & carrots,
CYoFC

Vegan MoFo! Day 5: Experimentation with the Mystery Fruits of My Neighborhood

I missed my Friday MoFo post last week, so instead, I bring you...a Sunday MoFo post!

Two plump persimmons from the CSA and three key limes from a friend of our roommate.

They say there are two types of kitchen talents: cooking and baking. I am definitely way more blessed with the former talent than with the latter. I'm very much of the mentality that goes more like "A dash of this, a sprinkle of that, let me taste it, and oh, just a touch more salt and it'll be perfect" than anything so scientific and exact as baking.

But, thanks to our most recent CSA delivery + an invitation to a vegan wine & dessert party, I was motivated to take a stab at inventing my first ever cookie recipe. And what fruit or vegetable, you ask, could've possibly inspired me to do such a thing? Well, inside this week's CSA box, I discovered these reddish-orange, tomato-looking things that I couldn't identify. Turns out they were Fuyu persimmon fruits. I don't think I'd ever encountered a persimmon before, let alone eaten one, so I did some research and found out that there are two common varieties: the Fuyu and the Hachiya. There are also a bunch of other kinds, which you can read about here if you're curious. 

Even Nico was curious about these strange fruits.

According to my internet research and personal experimentation, I can tell you that the Fuyu is solid in composition (when ripe), subtly sweet, and can be eaten like an apple or used in recipes for dishes such as chutney, salads, and sorbets. It's shaped like a tomato. The Hachiya, apparently, tends to be astringent, but I think it becomes really sweet once it's ripe, and to be ripe, it must be extremely mushy/soft. This kind of persimmon has a more oblong, pepper-type shape. Based on my research, it seemed as though it was the Hachiya that had earned the superlative Most Likely To Be Baked, but I was adamant about baking with my Fuyus and nothing was going to stop me. We'd received some beautiful red barlett and comice pears in our CSA, as well, so I figured I could just make up for any missing sweetness with a CSA comice and a fig from our fig tree.


So, after much deliberation, internet research, and cookbook cross-referencing, this is what I came up with:

S p i c e d   P e r s i m m o n   &   P e a r   C o o k i e s

Wet Ingredients:

2 Fuyu persimmons, peeled and diced
1 comice pear, peeled and diced
1 fig's worth of fig filling
2/3 cup Earth Balance (vegan butter), softened at room temperature 
1 teaspoon almond extract
OPTIONAL: if you want moister cookies, also add 1/3 cup of soy milk

Dry Ingredients:

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cups rolled oats
1 1/2 cups cane sugar (regular or brown; I used mostly regular and a little bit of brown because I ran out of regular. I think whatever will do.)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ginger
2/3 cup sliced almonds

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Mix the wet ingredients in a bowl and set aside. Mix the dry ingredients, EXCEPT for the almonds, in a separate bowl. Combine the wet and dry ingredients and stir until well mixed. Fold in the nuts gradually.

Scoop small spoonfuls of batter onto a cookie tray. Be sure to leave ample room in between cookies, as these WILL expand. Bake for 10-12 minutes. They will likely not seem fully "done," but trust me, they are - vegan cookies tend to solidify well after the baking process, so you can safely stop baking them before they reach the point where they look browned. Allow to cool. For extra cooking cred, garnish with a cinnamon stick or two.

The result is a cookie that's at least somewhat nutritious, just the right amount of sweet, and nice and chewy. It's also a very autumnal treat, given its gingery spice and in-season ingredients.

Let's get a visual representation of that recipe, shall we?

Dicing the persimmons

What the inside of a Fuyu persimmon looks like up close

The peeling of the comice pear

Spiced Pear & Persimmon cookie batter! pre-almond-adding

The finished product

A glimpse at the innards of the cookie when it's broken in half

And Now, A Sneak Preview...

That's right. I didn't mention this before because I thought it'd be a bit overwhelming, but Nico and I discovered a mystery fruit #2, pictured below, during our walk today. It had been hanging precariously off a skinny tree branch in a residential part Silver Lake, alongside other fruits of its kind. Curiously, not all of the other fruits were this size; there were a few that were this ginormous citri-bulb size, but the rest resembled standard-sized lemons. I mean, is this just an overgrown lemon? Or is it the adult version of something else we've never encountered? Maybe it's a pomelo, if they even grow here in southern California?

At any rate, stay tuned for my next Vegan MoFo experiment, in which I will get to the bottom of this fruit and turn it into something delicious!  

Nico generously lent me her tennis ball so you could see the shocking size comparison.