Cranberry Muffins!!!

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I’m writing this post in whisper-mode. That has nothing to do with Mr Gnoe sleeping late this Saturday morning. I’m just embarrassed to confess that with the dawn of February, I still had some ‘fresh’ cranberries left over from… Christmas. Oops!

So I felt a jolt when I stumbled upon the cranberry muffins Uniflame had baked. Just perfect! Except.. they weren’t vegan. But now that I’ve been ExtraVeganza for more than a year, it’s about time I took on a challenging recipe to veganize. So I went back to the original Dutch recipe on Yummy in my Tummy and got to work.

What do you know? I was done in a jiffy! :) [drumroll..] Here’s the result!

These muffins are awesome! Light, sweet -but not too much- and with a sour ‘pang’ each time you bite a cranberry. So I’m MEGA proud of myself — and future veganizing projects seem less daunting! #happy :)

Now I’m rather eager to share the recipe with you all!

Vegan cranberry muffins

Makes about 16 cakes.

Ingredients

• 150 gr fresh cranberries (washed)
• 265 gr all purpose flour
• 3 tsp baking powder
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 160 gr demerara sugar (cane) sugar
• 240 ml (1 cup) vanilla soy milk
• 60 ml (1/4 cup) soy yoghurt
• 85 gr vegan butter or margarine (I use Provamel Bio Soya Cook & Spread)*
• zest of 1 organic orange
• pinch of salt
• optional: powdered (confectioners) sugar

Preparation

1. Preheat oven to 200 °C ().
2. Grease a muffin tin or fill either silicon or disposable cupcake liners.
3. In a large bowl combine flour, baking powder, sugar, salt and cinnamon. Whisk well.
4. Add orange zest.
5. Melt the butter.
6. Combine the soy milk and yoghurt in another bowl or measuring cup, add the melted butter and stir well.
7. Add the wet to the dry mixture and stir with a wooden spoon until batter is just mixed.
8. Spoon batter in muffin pan/cupcake liners. (You can also use a piping bag or sturdy plastic bag with a corner cut of but I find this too much trouble.)
9. Bake the muffins about 20 minutes in the oven; they should be golden and when you pierce them with a skewer it should come out dry.
   Mine took 23 minutes but it depends on your oven.
10. Let the cakes cool down in the tin for 5 minutes, then take them out and let cool further on a rack.
11. If you wish you can sprinkle the muffins with powdered sugar after they have cooled down completely. I didn’t find this necessary taste wise.

Enjoy! :)

Can you freeze these muffins?
Although these muffins are best eaten on the same or next day, they stay pretty good for a while longer. It’s just that the top gets a little sticky after two days, but you can hide fix this with a sprinkling of powdered sugar.
After freezing they still taste very good, but again the top gets sticky and the texture less fluffy: a little drier and more compact. So they’re fine, but not their original awesomeness. ;)

With all the exclamation marks in this post I guess I left the quiet-modus very quickly. :) Well, that just shows you my enthusiasm about these muffins! So I hope you’ll be trying them someday too. :)

Now Mr Gnoe has woken up and it’s time to get the day started — maybe do some more baking this weekend? ;)

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Part of the February Sweet Luv event on Zesty Palette

& Zesty Palette’s ongoing Bake Fest #4 hosted by Tomato Blues

* I’m not a shareholder of Provamel! ;) I’ve just had great experience with their products. You can use any plant-based butter but if it’s got vitamin D3 added (which it often does), it’s not vegan!

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Belated B-day Bento (#134)

Last week we spent my birthday in the cinema watching Oscar nominated movies all day long. A perfect way of celebrating as far as I’m concerned, but of course it’s fun to have some family over (and get presents!) too. So I had a belated B-day party on Sunday and some leftover yumminess ended up in tomorrow’s (Tuesday) bento.

Right container

• The Adirondack Chick’s ‘Unstuffed Vegetarian Stuffed Peppers‘: brown rice with tomato, green peppers and zucchini (really good recipe!)
• marinated mushrooms (cremini & namelo)
• radish flowers
• parsley olives on a skewer
• garlic olives on a skewer
• lettuce lining
• basil, courgette and carrot details

Front container

• marinated grilled courgette
• raw vegetables: orange pepper, cauliflower, zucchini, cherry tomatoes, corn salad & rocket
• store-bought baba ganoush (really wanted to bring some of my homemade creamy hummus but ran out of it at the last minute)
• fried tofu
• mixed nuts

On the side

• 1/2 apple
• 1/2 Poire Williams

The gorgeous tulips were a present from my mother-in-law. Yep, the in-laws are awesome. :) My sister-in-law gave me my very first vegan cookbook for a present: La Dolce Vegan! by Sarah Kramer. And she didn’t even know I was looking for a cookery book to suit my new eating habits! She’s also the one who gave me the World Food Café cookbook that I recently raved about. So you may expect another review somewhere along the line. ;)

And finally — no birthday without cake! Newbie vegan or not. Here’s what I’ll be treating my colleagues to: vegan Brownies & Spicy Applesauce Cake with Lemon Frosting. YUM!

 

The Last (CSA vegetables week 51, 2010)

Our third season of CSA has come to a closing. Now we’ll need to decide on which veggies to buy all by ourselves again… Not an easy task! #lazybums

• purslane
• leek
• thyme
• red cabbage
• choggia beets
• apples
• variety of onions: shallot, red and white

When I got beets last time I made Nigel Slater’s Beetroot Seeds Cake and it was goooood!

Clicking on the picture will bring you to Flickr, where I’ve put up the link to the on-line recipe and some adaptations I made.

Yesterday was another Meatless Monday (Plantaardig Maandag) and supposed to be December’s #twitterfoodparty about squash, so I made a vegan Indian curry with basmati rice and (prefab) mango chutney with last week’s hokkaido pumpkin. The picture didn’t turn out too great but it tasted better than it looks. ;) Anyway, the food party got postponed due to too many ‘twabsentees‘…! If you want to join in, just make something with squash on January 10th, use the hashtag and tweet a picture!

So, no more CSA (b)log posts until the first week of May 2011. Some of you might think that a good thing… But hopefully not all???

Hello, it’s Halloween!

Actually very few people in Holland celebrate Halloween (we’ve got our own festival for children called Sint Maarten on November 11th), but if you roam the internet as much as I do you can’t help being inspired by the festive spirit. So I decided to share the pumpkin cookies I baked this month.

Would you like one? ;)

The original recipe called for brrrrrrrrr-raisins. Me no like ;) So I substituted these for mixed nuts: 75 grams of almond and 30 gr pistachios, next to the already required 100 gr walnuts.

The cookies were less sweet because of it, but I fixed that by adding a bag of vanilla sugar and powdering the finished goodies. NICE. :)

All ‘testers’ remarked how good it was that they were not that sugary!

I should be honest and tell you that I couldn’t really taste the fresh ginger… But that doesn’t assure me that these treats would have been as good if it had been left out!

It also took me double time to bake ‘em: 30 minutes instead of 15. Next time I’ll turn up the heat! A notch at least ;)

There’s a set on Flickr showing pictures of all steps.

I’ve posted a more comprehensive recipe in Dutch at the Kookgrrls’ weblog

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Join Beth Fish’s weekend cooking with a food-related post!

Bento musings: what to pack ’n stash (#1)

I guess all bento-ers have future plans for foodies to put in their bento. I know I do ;) As a reminder to myself — but also to inspire other people — I’ll be posting them as Bento musings: what to pack ’n stash.

I do try to be original: recipes by others will be linked. And of course suggestions are always welcome! :)

So here’s my first ‘note to self’: next time I am going to cook semolina pudding, I plan to make a few small ones in my mini muffin mould. Seems like a great thing to put in my bento! Especially when I add a container of raspberry sauce… *drewl* :P

Or maybe I’ll be making custard pudding first, you never know ;)

Is there anybody clever out there who can tell me if these desserts can be freezed??? :-o

Cute Cupcakes & Japanese Soup Bowls

Because my brother couldn’t come to Mr Gnoe’s actual birthday we decided to have a small after-party exactly one month later. Which was yesterday ;)

Since I had the day off I baked some cupcakes (as you can see I used the silicon cups I bought last week). They turned out really well! We couldn’t eat them all so I put some in the freezer to use as bento stash :) Hopefully they will still taste good!

Hubby got a couple of gorgeous lacquer soup bowls for a B-day present. We didn’t have any yet, so it’s a great gift! Now we have the perfect excuse to eat Japanese again real soon ;)