You can't go wrong with pie

I came home from work on Thursday to find that Nadine had baked me a pie.

The Banana Toffee Pudding Pie (otherwise known as Banoffee) from Vegan Pie in the Sky as a matter of fact.

Could anything be more delicious?

Perhaps a tad too soon...

...but here is a delicious recipe in celebration of bananas being almost cheap enough to buy again. It was inspired from my copy of 'The 21st birthday Cookery Book of the Country Women's Association in Tasmania'. Most of the recipes for meals hold pretty much no interest for me (laden with various animal parts and by-products) but the desserts and confections can mostly be made suitable for us!

Baked Banana Pudding
Serves 4-6

Ingredients

115g margarine (I use nuttlex lite)
2 med-large bananas
2 tbsp chia seeds
1/2 cup cold water
zest and juice of one lemon
1 cup raw caster sugar (or regular sugar)
1 cup of wholemeal self raising flour


Make sure you use McAlpin's!

Method

Pre heat oven to 180 degrees Celcius.

Mix chia seeds into water and set aside to thicken. Mash bananas in a small bowl and set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, cream together the margarine and sugar. Add lemon juice and zest and beat to combine. Beat in chia seed goo and bananas until well combined. Sift in flour (don't forget to re add in the bran) and beat again until combined. You may need to add a little bit of milk...the batter should be thick but not dry at all.

Pour batter into a greased or lined baking tin (I used a small brownie pan). Bake for about 45 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the center comes out clean.

After baking

Serve with ice cream!
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I served ours with half arsed frozen vanilla hazelnut iced milk cream mixture. Haha it was ok.

The pudding however was delicous! I'm kind of surprised it worked, but there isn't any reason it wouldn't have is there. It's soft and moist without being gooey and gross, it's not TOO sweet, though maybe next time I'll experiment with less sugar. It leaves room for any add ins - nuts, raisins, chocolate...And it''s really simple with few ingredients! If you don't want to see your chia seeds, try using a flax egg replacement for two eggs or you can buy white chia seeds. I don't care...they aren't noticeably crunchy in this either. If you don't like a lemony flavour, omit it and use vanilla essense. You'll probably need the milk at the end if you do that though.

I've bookmarked many many recipes in my book and I'm pretty excited about a few of them :)

Wholemeal Banana and Raspberry Muffins

I love banana muffins. It's really the only kind of banana I like, but the same old plain banana muffins get boring after a while.

Wholemeal Banana and Raspberry Muffins (cane sugar free, fat free)

Makes 12 regular muffins

Ingredients

2 cups plain wholemeal flour

1 tbsp baking powder

1 tbsp whole flaxseeds, ground mixed with 3 tbsp water

3/4 cup soy milk

1 tsp apple cider vinegar

1 tsp vanilla essence

1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce

1/2 cup mashed ripe banana (2 small)

1 cup frozen unsweetened raspberries

Method

Lightly grease a muffin pan with margarine or oil. These muffins will probabaly stick to paper liners, and my muffin pan isn't non stick, though if yours is in theory you won't need to grease.

Preheat oven to 200 degrees C.

In a small bowl or jug mix together the soy milk and cider vinegar and set aside to curdle.

In a large bowl sift or stir together the flour and baking powder.

In another small bowl mash the banana and stir in the vanilla, flax egg, curdled milk and applesauce.

Gently fold the milk mixture into the flour and stir in the raspberries. Divide evenly among muffin holes and bake for 15-20 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean :)

These were just sweet enough for me. We are trying to cut out sugar, but if you want a little extra sweetness in your muffins you could add 1/4 - 1/2 cup of sugar. I have to remind myself that just because they are healthy it doesn't mean I can eat them all at once haha. I have a million frozen bananas so I could just make some more..

I was going to post the rye banana muffins I made but I can't find the recipe I wrote down! So I posted these instead.

Also, I finally figured out how to add a tab across the top of my blog page! So now there is an about me section. I figured people read this now so why not. I'm thinking of adding a recipe page too. One day :)

Banana-Blueberry-Buckwheat Pancakes

Poor Nadine had to go to work this morning, so I was eating breakfast alone. On the weekend days we have off work together we usually cook up a fancy breakfast: tofu scramble, baked beans, mushies, homemade hash browns...

Anyway I'm pretty sure I was dreaming about pancakes last night because when I woke up I really wanted some. I can't remember the last time I had pancakes. Either way they weren't very good because we just put flour and soy milk in a bowl and mixed it all up. They weren't bad, but we probabaly should have used a recipe :)

I also had a heap of buckwheat flour that my sister's boyfriend's mum gave me. Apparently she bought it for something and only needed it once and when she heard I was vegan she just gave it to me haha. Apparently vegans eat all sorts of weird health food store products...yes I do. Anyway I was very grateful because I'd been wanting to start using buckwheat flour (I want to make my own soba noodles one day) but I couldn't be bothered going to buy some. Hooray!

I borrowed the idea from this recipe from Chocolate Covered Katie's blog.

Banana-Blueberry-Buckwheat Pancakes

Serves 1

Ingredients

1/6 cup whole meal flour

1/6 cup buckwheat flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/4 cup of soy milk

1/2 a mashed banana

Handful of blueberries

Pure maple syrup

Vegan margarine

Mix together the dry ingredients in one bowl.

Mash banana in another bowl then stir in milk and blueberries.

Combine the wet and dry ingredients. (You may need to add more milk if the mixture is too thick. I did but I didn't measure...it was an extra couple of tablespoons I think.)

Melt the margarine in a frying pan and blob in the batter. Cook each until bubbles form around the edges then flip over and cook for a bit more on the other side. (I managed to burn mine a tiny bit but it was fine).

Serve on a plate with the rest of the banana sliced up, some more blueberries and maple syrup.

This should make about 5 small pancakes :) 

Nadine was missing out! She's going to be very upset when she hears about it. If I had the time to make these every morning before work I would. They were so delicious! I reckon the best pancakes I've ever had.

I'll be making these for Nadine next weekend I think :) I'm pretty sure just doubling the recipe will be fine. I wonder what they would be like with 100% buckwheat flour?

Monster Salad and cake

I don't tend to like salads very much. I love potato salad and pasta salads though, nice big bowls of carby goodness! When I go out to a restaurant for dinner, I usually assume that a salad will be the only vegan option - usually even salads aren't a vegan option, they are either covered in eggy milky mayonaise, creamy dressings, cheese, or pieces of decomposing cows, chickens, pigs and or ducks! Who puts meat in a freaking salad? Don't even get me started on the other vegetarian options so loaded with cheese you'll have a heart attack just looking at it...!

ANYWAY, today I was planting some beetroot seeds in the garden (I planted some a few weeks ago just before the rains came so I think they rotted before they sprouted) and I noticed 1 radish was ready to be eaten, and that I had millions more butter beans since yesterday! So I harvested it all and wanted to eat it. There's no better way to eat freshly picked radishes and beans than raw, so I decided to make it into a salad.

And damn was it GOOD!

The massive bowl full includes: kale, a large handful of butter beans, 1 sliced spring onion, 1 cob of fresh corn stripped of it's kernels (best way to eat corn!), the 1 tiny radish, 1 tomato, the leaves of the radish, 1 tbsp avocado oil, 2 tsp balsamic vinegar and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil, and some black pepper.

Argh I just remembered I was going to put some fresh parsley and basil leaves in it too but I forgot. It was still delicious without them though! The avocado oil and corn mix really well.

I was struggling to finish it by the end, but I managed :)

Since it'll be summer soon, I'm going to try and eat raw at least once a week, or every lunch or something like that. There's nothing quite as refreshing (except perhaps a mojito in Spain) and if I keep getting beans, this type of salad will come up often :)

Yesterday I had a bit of an accident while riding to tafe on my bike! I thought I would make it over this tiny little gutter (actually I knew I wouldn't make it but went anyway) and I hit it at the wrong angle and completely stacked it on the concrete! I've ended up with a twisted wrist, bruised shoulder bones, bleeding knee and bruised swollen ankle. What a freakin pain the the ass!

I still made it to school and all the way home on my bike though which is good. Apart from the falling, it felt really good to ride all the way. I've been trying to ride to school a few times lately, but it's mostly failed. The first time I tried I nearly fainted and died (time of month = very low iron levels), the next time I got too hot and ended up with a little bit of heat stroke...so on and so forth. But this time I just kept going! (There's a huge big hill, but once you get over it it's all downhill from there!) So falling and hurting myself has ruined my endeavour to ride to school every day this week. I'll have to start again next Tuesday. Argh!

SO I decided to stay home from school today (I think driving would hurt my shoulder) and I baked myself a big ass banana cake.

I have used this recipe maybe 4 or 5 times now and it's still amazingly good. Everyone I've served it to loves it. I don't even like cake! Or bananas! I found it somewhere on the internet. It's a pretty basic recipe that I have tweaked a tiny bit.

Vegan Banana Cake

Serves 8 (or 2 pigs like us!)

Ingredients

2 cups whole meal flour

1 1/2 teaspoons of baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup raw sugar (this time I used about 1/2 cup raw vanilla sugar* and filled the rest up with dextrose**)

1/3 cup unrefined coconut oil (this is the type that tastes like coconut)

3 ripe bananas

1/4 cup water

1 teaspoon vanilla essense

Method

In one bowl, stir together the flour, salt and baking soda.

In another bowl, whisk or beat the sugar and oil together. Mash in the bananas and add the water and vanilla. Stir well.

Plonk the dry ingredients into the wet ones and stir until combined. (Mixture may be quite thick - every time I've made this I've used a different type of oil. This one is the best so far.) Pour into a lightly greased springform cake pan and bake for 45 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean, in an oven at 180 degrees C.

Let cool for minute and serve!

Sometimes I make up a 'cream cheese' icing using tofutti better than cream cheese, or simply sprinkle icing sugar (powdered sugar) on top. It doesn't need any topping at all unless you feel like it :) The cream cheese one is the nicest, though, but my local supermarket stopped carrying tofutti, which is probabaly a good thing...

*When I buy vanilla beans to use the seeds I just put the pods in a jar of sugar. It will taste of vanilla almost instantly!

**I'm trying to use up the last of my dextrose because I want to use real sugar again...or stevia or something. Dextrose is a bit too processed for my liking. I'll have to research it a bit more I think!

I had this a little while after my monster salad with a cup of freshly brewed Italian plunger coffee with a glob of So Good Vanilla Bliss ice cream in it :) I'm not a big coffee drinker, but I like it with cakes and muffins and cookies etc. I also usually drink it black with no sugar but my lovely Nadine bought me the ice cream last night when I was in my invalid state :) Aawww <3