Vegan French Toast with Strawberries

On Friday, I bought some bread and strawberries at the WSM to whip up some french toast for my sleep-over buddy Sunday morning, but alas, she was trying to avoid yeast this weekend, so I ended up having to feast alone.

I've long wanted to attempt making vegan french toast, but I hate that almost every recipe calls for tofu. NOT EVERYONE HAS TOFU HANDY ALL THE TIME, PEOPLES! So I was joyous when I stumbled across a vegan french toast recipe that was tofu-free and instead relied on nutritional yeast for its oomph. I was a bit suspicious that it might taste weirdly cheesy, given the nutritional yeast, but it didn't really--instead, it just added a bit of salty flavorfulness to the fairly-simple recipe.

I used a loaf of fresh 7-grain bread from the WSM to grill this shit up, and it was quite good. Initially, I thought it might end up a bit soggy since the recipe's heavy on the milk (and the bread is heavy on the sponginess), but I cooked it long enough that it was crunchy on the outside and not-too-gooey on the inside.

For the topping, I just blended up a bunch of fresh strawberries with my handheld blender-thingie.

When I realized this was not sweet enough to satisfy my mammoth sweet-tooth, I just poured a bit of sugar on top and mmmm mmm mm was it tasty.

I can't 100% verify how much the vegan french toast tasted like regular french toast, simply because I tend to douse things like pancakes and french toast with as much toppings as humanly possible, but from what I could tell, it was a very tasty variation on a standard family breakfast. Plus, it's damn simply, so I'd definitely recommend trying it out sometime.

RECIPE: Here

VERDICT: A

Peanut-Butter Chocolate Cake

I had folks over my place this weekend, so I thought: what better excuse do I have to bake a cake?

I also had a jar of Veganaise that I was worried I wouldn't get through before it went bad. So when I stumbled across a recipe for chocolate cake that called for using Veganaise (from Vegan Family Favorites), I knew it was the one I'd be toying with Saturday afternoon.

The recipe is a fairly-rich one for chocolate cake with spatterings of semi-sweet chocolate chips strewn throughout. The cake came out a bit too crumbly for me (which made it a little difficult to frost and to serve) but nice and moist. Upon having a bit of mishap with the cooling process (I pulled off part of the top of one of the cakes after cooling it on a plate), I realized that there are a few staples that I really need to suck it up and buy already: 1) cooling racks and 2) a second cake pan.

For the frosting, I decided to go with a recipe for Chocolate Ganache frosting from The Candle Cafe Cookbook (mainly just because it was the only frosting recipe for which I actually had all the ingredients handy). Holy mother of god, is this a good frosting. I think it's gonna be my stand-by when it comes to frosting chocolate cakes. It calls for semi-sweet chocolate chips, a bit of maple syrup, some soy milk, and a tad bit of coffee (though I may be forgetting something) and it is decadently sweet, amazingly thick, and orgasmically rich.

Because I didn't wanna use up all my chocolate chips for the frosting (and because based on past experiences, I've noticed that everyone seems to give frosting recipes that make enough to frost a small foreign country), I decided to make only a 1/4 of the recipe and instead frost the center and the outer rim of the cake with my own peanut-butter frosting recipe (a concoction of homemade powdered sugar, natural peanut butter, and soy milk). My frosting was a bit runny on the outside rim, only because I was impatient and didn't let it sit in the fridge (the frosting I used for the center *did* sit in the fridge long enough), but I still thought it tasted quite good.

All in all, it was a good recipe and a good baking experience. The cake itself seemed like it was missing a little bit of something, some indefinable oomph in the form perhaps of sweetness or decadence or chocolatey-goodness, but what was lacking in that was definitely made up for in the frosting.

VERDICT: A

Baking Tips (Or "How to Avoid Unleashing the Wrath of Balloon Chef")

Vegan baking is *not* an impossibility, but at times it can be a bit of a challenge. (Damn you, eggs!) For that reason, here be some baking tips, both vegan-specific and not.

So put them in your pipe and smoke it. Otherwise the wrath of Balloon Chef shall strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger!

Bake! Bake in fear!



VEGAN-SPECIFIC BAKING TIPS:

• On "Baking Without Using Eggs, Milk, and Buttah" from The Post Punk Kitchen



• Ten Tips for Perfect Vegan Baking



• How to Bake Eggless Cakes and Cookies

NOT-SPECIFICALLY VEGAN BAKING TIPS:

• Hershey's Kitchen Baking Tips and Hints



• The Awesomest, Best, Most-Detailed Cookie-Baking Guide in the History of Humankind (Yip yip!)

USEFUL BOOKS ON BAKING:

• Great Good Desserts Naturally: The author apparently was (is?) a pastry chef, and about 1/3 of the book is dedicated to very specific and detailed tips on everything from what different types of flour are good for what different types of baking to discussion of substitutions in recipes to conversation about how to make those damn vegan pastries *fluffy* without eggs. Pretty much anything you might think of asking with regard to baking is answered here and in precise detail. If you're into baking, this is a definite must-have.


• Vegan Family Favorites: Although the content of this book does not deal strictly with baking-only, it does offer up some useful tips and tidbits on baking and substitutions in its intro.