Gluten free vegan chocolate cake :)

I was asked to make a chocolatey cake for a baby shower/restaurant dinner that we went to last night. I decided I'd better make it gluten free as the friend of ours who organised may be gluten intolerant (and it's fun to make non-traditional things even more non-traditional!). I ended up make it twice - the dinner was supposed to be on the weekend but said friend got food poisoning so it was postponed. So I took the first cake (pictured above) to dads place for dessert and it was happily gobbled up.

I followed this recipe (Mexican chocolate Cake by Gluten-free goddess) almost exactly for the first cake, with a few minor edits: I used 100% buckwheat flour, dark brown sugar, No-egg instead of Ener-G, guar gum instead of xanthan [couldn't find it, guar worked fine], allspice instead of cinnamon, orange sweet potato, molasses and rice syrup instead of honey, coconut oil instead of shortening, apple cider vinegar instead of lemon juice, and only two tsp of vanilla extract. It also took quite a bit longer to bake than said - I'm pretty sure it's my unreliable oven.

For the icing I made a basic vegan buttercream from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, and used coconut oil instead of shortening, which worked but there were a few lumps of solid coconut oil in it once set.

This cake was friggin delicious! Buckwheat flour is very fine so it was really nice and soft, rather than clumpy. Best chocolate cake I've made, and I'm not really a fan of chocolate cake at all. I want to make gluten free brownies out of the batter, which I think would work really well, since it's that sort of dense texture, but a bit cakey. I shall experiment.

When I made it again for the baby celebrations, I decided to do a two level cake, so I baked two! I put a layer of choko jam on first as per Nadine's request (it worked really well!), smothered that in the same icing as I used before (except I didn't make enough so I had to make another batch).

Plonked the other cake on top and then more icing. As you can see I didn't put enough icing in the middle - I'd put it over the edge next time or level out the cake around the outside to make it a bit more presentable.

Since it was all about babies I drew this on top with black writing icing I got from Woolworths - vegan as far as we could tell (labelled gluten free as well). Tastes like poison but none of the ingredients were in our little vegan shoppers guide. Isn't it cute?

The retsuarant staff thought it was for a birthday so they put a candle in it and sang happy birthday! It was mortifying. But that's ok because the cake was fabulous!

With the second cake I didn't have enough buckwheat to make two cakes, so I mixed together 1:1 buckwheat and rice flour like suggested in the recipe. It worked, but 100% buckwheat was a fair bit nicer :) I also didn't have enough sweet potato puree so I put 1/4 cup in each cake and it didn't seem to affect the texture too much.

So hooray! Gluten free vegan chocolate cake success! Everyone at least seemed to enjoy it :)

I wonder what muffins made with buckwheat flour would be like?

A new kind of breakfast :)



I'm quite a terrible photographer!

Raw buckwheat porridge!

I made half the recipe (in case I didn't like it) as per this blog entry by Oh She Glows. My choice of toppings were unsweetened apple sauce (not raw but who cares), currants and raw sunflower seeds. Peanut butter would have been good! Or you know, pretty colourful fruits like the photo in the original entry ;)

I made this up the night before and heated it up in the morning (I think it's better cold/room temp) before adding the applesauce, seeds and currants.

It didn't solidify in the fridge overnight like I thought it would (because of the chia seeds) which was good because I didn't need to add more milk to it.

And the best part is I already have tomorrow's breakfast ready! That's an extra five minutes in bed for me :)

Saturday morning pancakes

I think Saturday is my favourite day of the week. I can sleep in and fart ass around all day if I feel like it - it doesn't matter since the next day is Sunday and I still don't have to go to work! I like to make a nice breakfast on Saturdays, because all week I've probabaly eaten the same thing, usually oats, and it's nice to have a fancy cooked brekkie when I'm not awake before sunrise. Sometimes it'll be scrambled tofu with baked beans, or I'll make my own hash browns (maybe I'll do that tomorrow! Nadine isn't working hooray!), a lot of the time it's pancakes, specifically, buckwheat because I've decided I love buckwheat flour, and besides, every time I've attempted vegan pancakes with regular flour it's failed miserably.

I know it's like the exact same picture as all my other pancakes I've posted on this here blog, but it's different because they are giant and have raspberries in them. I also used a different recipe since I don't have any bananas - at a million dollars a kilo, I'm sorry!

The recipe I used is 'Grandma's Buckwheat Pancakes' onVegWeb.com. They are delicious. I also ate the entire lot, I wish I hadn't because now I feel sick! I put a blob of nuttlex and tofutti cream cheese and some lemon juice on mine. I also made them with almond milk, and cut the oil down to 2 tbsp and had no issues. These pancakes also commemorate the first time my smoke detector hasn't gone off while making pancakes! Amazing. Last time it didn't stop. As in, when I took the batteries out it was still beeping.

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In other news, I had my first pilates class on Thursday! It was great. My abs STILL hurt (which is kind of annoying but it shows that they did some work!) my legs hurt my arms hurt my butt hurts.

Thursday couldn't possibly have been a better day to do it, either! We had been weeding while standing and bening ALL DAY at work so my back and legs and feet were just killing me. Wedding like that is like a constant lunge, and because I'm uncoordinated on my left side I always use my right leg so that hamstring wants to kill me. Also my right knee always hurts, so I think this class is really going to be helpful. Also I reckon a couple more goes and I might be able to touch my toes without struggle. Ha.

Speaking of exercise, our half marathon walk is next Sunday! Nadine wasn't working at the start of the week so everyday as soon as I got home we went for a quick walk up the street and back, (about 2.5km) which has been good since it stretches out my legs from work and it makes us exercise and thus spend more time together. This weekend we'll have to bust out a much longer walk - at least 10km. Tomorrow we have to pick up our kit from the city so I think we should walk there and back.

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My plans for the day include doing the laundry (the homemade detergent really does make it softer!), baking some more bread (I'm seeing how long I can go without buying a loaf from the shop! So far I've made one loaf.) and making some vegan pepperoni from Vegan on the Cheap to put on a pizza for dinner. I should also probabaly practise some of the pilates stuff I learnt - I'll see how sore I am and if I can toughen up and handle it :)

Date day!

Today Nadine and I had the day off together (yay!) so we decided to have a date day rather than just sit around watching telly which is what we usually end up doing.

First there was breakfast. I made buckwheat pancakes again, but we had no maple syrup so we squeezed a lemon over the top and melted a little bit of margarine on them. Delicious. I also used straight buckwheat flour, not half and half. Didn't make a difference at all, I thought they might be a little dry but nope. Perfect. I topped them with some fried sliced banana.

Nadine drinking yummy cocktail

I got to choose the restaurant, so I picked Ginga Japanese restaurant because we haven't been there for ages. We started off with a cocktail - sake, gin, ginger ale, lemon and pickled ginger slices. Mmm. The sugar in it kind of gave us a headache though, haha. That's the problem with giving things up! 

Nadine ordered the bento. Clockwise from left: PLain rice with black sesame, vege tempura (eggplant, sweet potato, carrot, zucchini and capsicum) steamed vege and tofu, inari zushi and an egg sushi, Ignore that we didn't eat it haha.

We of course has edamame on the side. Can't go to a Japanese restaurant without edamame!

I had this massive bowl of veges in broth with some bean thread noodles, rice, miso soup and pickled things. Yuuuum.

The glands in my throat have been acting up over the last few days (tmi? Ha) so I ended the lovely day with a green juice :) Silver beet, carrot, orange, ginger. Hopefully it all goes away because I can't afford any days off work!

While we were in the city we walked past a little cafe that said they had vegan sweet options on a sign outside so after lunch we went and had a delicious piece of (sugary!) cake. It was chocolate with mint icing. And we found beetroot in it. It was pretty good. I forgot to take a picture though :)

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?