From the monthly archives: May 2009
May 24 marks my 3rd year as a blogger! Yippee! It is so amazing to look back through my archives and see so many transformations, to see my thoughts and writing keeping up with the beat of my steps in this world. To celebrate this, and a good friend’s birthday in the coming week, I opted to make a truly special batch of cupcakes: Ice Cream Cone cupcakes!
Housed in hydrogenated wafer cones, these cupcakes are certainly not healthy. So I decided to go all out on the unhealthy and whip up some fluffy vanilla buttercream icing with my brand new handheld mixer. The result was super fluffy and sweet, ready for piping!
I filled up the wafer cones with basic chocolate cupcake batter and whisked them into the 350 degrees oven. They had to cook a bit longer considering the long, narrow holders they were in. They took about 28 minutes or so.
And there they are all done and naked, patiently waiting for their buttercream headresses.
Here I am piping them up with the sugary whipped icing. This is my first time using this pastry bag!
The result was a huge success!
Here’s to many more!
Plain and simple: There is no successful recipe for Vegan Angel Food Cake posted on the internet. It may not even exist at all. I, like many others, have thoroughly turned over every stone with no luck. In fact, Hannah, of My Sweet Vegan fame, blogged about her attempts at mastering this fluffy white foam cake just a few weeks back. Today, I too tried out the same mysterious recipe she did, the one that is seeming to offer hope in this angelic debacle: Bryanna Clark Grogan‘s Angel Torte. But don’t click so quick! At this link you may purchase access to her Angel Torte recipe by way of her newsletter, which contains many other yummy-sounding recipes, for five smackaroos. Bryanna is very clear about not wanting her recipe posted on the world wide web. I will respect her wishes even though I think the chances of someone perfecting a vegan version of angel food cake will be a collective effort that builds upon her version and that, for the greater good of vegan dessert progress, sharing is caring.
If Hannah isn’t able to achieve success with tweaking a recipe for vegan angel food cake, I certainly cannot. I attempted an angel food cake one other time in my life. Over 20 years ago. As a kid, my older sister and I thought it’d be a sweet gesture to make my mom a cake. You know, like open the boxed mix and add egg, oil and what have you. The recipe called for egg whites. So my sister and I added the only white we knew of eggs… the shells! Needless to say, the crunchy cake was not a success for the reasons my sister and I had wanted it to be. Now, decades later, and with no help from egg, here is my photo report on attempt number 2:
Kiss my bundt.
The result was yummy but not really angel food cake. It was dense and heavy despite the airy batter. And I should have used my better judgement and not used a whole wheat pastry flour, which was suggested in the recipe, as it was quite doughy and tough, even a bit hard to put a fork through. I will try it again soon with cake flour and report on the results soon. So that is that.The search continues. While vegans wait for their angel food cake, let them feast on rich devil’s food cake.Consumer Reports {an aside}:
In direct response to writing this posting, I made several purchases. First, in thinking about how trusted vegan recipe sources, the strong community of vegan food blogs and the post-Post Punk Kitchen creative zeal of today’s vegans have progressed a once limiting diet to the pinnacle of decadent deliciousness, I ordered Vegan Soul Kitchen, Isa’s Vegan Brunch and, finally, Vegan with a Vengeance, as well as pre-ordered her Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I also ordered Caustic Resin’s Nice Wings from the iTunes store, a song I only had on a mix tape once upon a time when the Earth was green in a town of Douglas Firs. Exploit those variables in your next advertising meeting!
There are so many not-so-great vegan recipes online. Even though credible sources are well-established, they, too, once began as experiments. But this particular experiment yielded a relatively bland risotto, unfortunately. Even though Italian cooking, despite my Sicilian majority, is not my forte, I feel like this font and wallpaper has left me unsatisfied before. Like any art or practice, however, there are no mistakes just learning opportunities.
Me hiding in dill.
Lil bit of this, lil bit of that.
Skinned knee
If this risotto’s a rockin’…
Too much green?
Caution: portion of risotto expands tenfold in the belly.
Tomorrow I continue to stray from trusted paths in a high-stakes dessert. Will Paypal-ing un-blog-friendly vegan chefs have me running back to the ol’ tried and true stand-bys? Tune in to next time!
1.) Lust
Lust (Latin, Cupidita), or lechery, is usually thought of as excessive thoughts or desires of a sexual nature. Dante’s criterion was excessive love of others, which therefore rendered love and devotion to God as secondary.
Mega-D.I.L.F. Panda Bear, Terminal 5, NYC (photo: Joseph “Whoa Whoa Whoa” Roth c/o Eat My Shots.)
2.) Gluttony
Derived from the Latin gluttire, meaning to gulp down or swallow, gluttony (Latin, gula) is the over-indulgence and over-consumption of anything to the point of waste. In the Christian religions, it is considered a sin because of the excessive desire for food, or its withholding from the needy.
F&B‘s Great Dane veggie dog combo.
Marissa’s Birthday Cupcakes!
3.) Greed
Greed (Latin, avaritia), also known as avarice or covetousness, is, like lust and gluttony, a sin of excess. However, greed (as seen by the church) is applied to the acquisition of wealth in particular. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that greed was “a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things.”
My empty wallet in my bag in a doctor’s exam room, where I waited for 30 minutes to see her for 15.
4.) Sloth
Sloth is defined as spiritual and/or actual apathy, putting off what God asks you to do, or not doing it or anything at all. Acedia is a Latin word, from Greek akedia, literally meaning “absence of caring”. Acedia is also deemed to lead to God’s wrath. Sloth can also concern wasting due to lack of use or allowing entropy, expanding into almost any person, place, thing, skills, or intangible ideal that would require maintenance, refinement and/or support to continue to exist.
The Wire Season 3 all-day marathon.
5.) Vanity
In many religions vanity, in its modern sense, is considered a form of self-idolatry, in which one rejects God for the sake of one’s own image, and thereby becomes divorced from the graces of God. The stories of Lucifer, Narcissus and others attend to a pernicious aspect of vanity. 
Extended arm photos. The thorn in the side of digital camera but who can resist?
6.) Envy
Like greed, Envy (Latin, invidia) may be characterized by an insatiable desire; they differ, however, for two main reasons. Those who commit the sin of envy resent that another person has something they perceive themselves as lacking, and wish the other person to be deprived of it. Dante defined this as “love of one’s own good perverted to a desire to deprive other men of theirs.” 
CandyPenny‘s shot of the Veggie Pride Parade, which I missed because of Drunkeness (below) and Sloth (above).
7.) Drunkeness
Drunkenness, or inebriation, is the condition of being intoxicated by consumption of alcoholic beverages to such a degree that mental or physical faculties are altered or impaired.
Post-Semester drinks/Marissa’s Birthday bash
Sources: Wiki
Animal Collective hosted an enormous party for 3,000 of their disciples at Terminal 5 last night. The show- from the third floor balcony, next to the 7 foot speakers and above the undulating sea of fans- was awesome. Not so much as in “radical dude!” but as in I was in awe the entire 2 hours they played. Intoxicated by the lights, the sounds and those far more complex scientfic processes that govern good feelings, the show ranks as tops for the year thus far. The aerial shots are below. For some amazing shots from the battleground level, check out Joe’s Eat My Shots.
With some time and bananas to kill, I cracked my Joy of Vegan Baking in the hopes of curing my sweet craving without having to change my over-sized sweatpants. My selection: a warm, banana crisp. Sure, I am a sucker for any kind of banana dessert but this quick and easy recipe’s result was fabulous. All it needed was a scoop of coconut-based vanilla ice cream.
I used to work a few blocks away from S’nice, Manhattan’s awesome veg sandwich shop, and have frequented it many times. Yet through all the work lunches and meet-ups, I have stayed monogamous to their Vegan Panini. It is just perfect: a warm, toasted, roof-of-the-mouth-scraping flatbread smeared with green pesto and stuffed with generous rectangles of smoked tofu and sun-dried tomatoes. At S’nice the sandwiches are whoppers, enough to wrap half up for the next day’s lunch, and always include a heap of mixed greens.
When the place first opened, I had a horrible experience with their cupcakes. I bought myself a red velvet cupcake and was in shock with how terrible something so yummy-looking can taste. I don’t know if I got a bad batch or if I hallucitasted to help my dwindling allowance for eating out, but it took me years to try another. Feeling brave, I threw in a cupcake at my last visit. Now, I am sure my initial negative experience had to be a fluke. The cupcake was delicious!
Let’s talk more about cupcakes. Mother’s Day cupcakes! My special Mom gets some basic chocolates with some of my leftover marsh-nilla frosting and some shaved chocolate for her celebration. So pretty! But the warm May sun melted off all the frosting in transport so they looked a haggered upon arrival. 
Another special lady, canine-extrodinaire Pancake, had her birthday Pup Pie from Lazy Dog Cookies. She’s a now 7 and showing off her new grey snout these days. Look at her chomp her cake down! Next year I’ll try whipping up a special homemade treat.
Fellow veghead CandyPenny and I headed south to our nation’s capitol to sample some area eats. First stop after a smooth ride, Great Sage in Clarksville, Maryland. Although I initially hoped to try the Seitan Wellington off their dinner menu, I had to compromise with checking out their lunch… there is only so much you can eat in one day! My Southwest burger lunch was tasty and fire-hot with a side of chipotle aioli. A great start to a day of eating. 
A perk of making a stop at Great Sage is that it’s inside an upscale shopping complex with a pretty amazing supermarket, Roots Market. During our visit, there were samples galore. Below is their chocolates, fair trade for Fair Trade Day. CandyPenny bought some vegan mini-donuts there for intermittent snacking.
Next, the sweet stuff. After years of having Sticky Fingers Bakery in my bookmarks, I finally got there! The place was much bigger than I thought and filled with a great variety of patrons. And why not, their vegan cupcakes were totally yum. I got the strawberry creme and the s’mores cupcakes. A bit heavy on the icing, however. But I am quite the advocate for bottom-heavy cupcakes. 
Here I am with my sweet strawberry cupcake. 
Next was Java Green, because driving from eatery to bakery sure works up your appetite! I got one of their warm and toasty Che sandwiches. Scrumptious bread stuffed with vegan cheese, red pepper and some kind of texturized soy protein-chicken stuff. It was a great quick bite. 
We came, we saw, we ate and ate more. Though we by-passed the usual tourist track of monuments, I have got another trip to D.C. on the calendar in June when I sample some vegan hot dogs at the Nationals’ stadium when the Mets kick their butt. But one last thing before I nod out on the 95 north: Liquid Earth in Fells Point section of Baltimore. I blogged about this great spot here when I head south for the Inauguration in January. It’s a great juice joint with plenty of vegan treats and ‘wich options.
This posting has been brewing for years. (Alternate name: Smart Patty My Ass.)
You probably know of LightLife‘s packaged veggie meats, maybe picked some up at some point given their widespread availability. They’re everywhere!
Of course they’re everywhere. They get delivered with the Chef Boyardee, the Eggos, Orville Redenbacher’s, the Slim-Jims and the Redi-Whips. Lightlife, like the other brands listed, are own by ConAgra, the super agribusiness/largest packaged food company in North America.
As with many profit machines, ConAgra is running quite a disgusting operation. Putting aside the fact that their packaged “food” brands are antithetic of my vegan foodie sensibilities, they are criticized for their environmental practices, or lack thereof, their labor practices, plant health violations, unethical business practices and their staunch support of keeping labels off genetically modified food (along with buddy super-powers PepsiCo, General Mills, Kelloggs, Sara Lee, and Heinz. All who fought Oregon’s measure 27 hard)<source>.
And yes, they are one of the largest producers of beef in the U.S. Their slaughter capacity exceeded 1.5 million in 1999<source>. Who knows how many animals ConAgra is slaughtering these days… They’ve been buying up smaller meat packing plants up the wazoo and the figures are hard to locate. This wonderful company is also the numero uno provider of meat to fast food establishments. (Note: ConAgra may be familiar to you from the book sensation must-read, Fast Food Nation.)
Ok, ConAgra buys Lightlife in 2000. The biggest meat producer buys the little veggie-protein company that could. But you’d hardly know what your purchase of Lightlife is profiting. Lightlife seems like it is a separate entity. It seems responsible, built on sustainable business practices. It even has a tab on its website that preaches the good word about reducing your meat intake while a streaming video on their “About Us” talks of the environmental damage of a meat-based diet.
All of this is a bit confusing. Kind of. I mean, I understand: It is nice to have vegan products so widely available. It’s nice to have quick options now and again. Awesome that Lightlife’s website is educating people of the health and environmental problems associated with eating meat. All of that is good… But the fact remains: When you buy Lightlife your money goes to ConAgra. I don’t consider a product like this vegan. Especially with all the other choices out there, there is just no reason for a vegan to make that kind of compromise.
I recall a few years back Lightlife making available special online coupons. Many vegan blogs posted about them, including the dishes they made using Lightlife’s products. Blogs were receiving free care packages from Lightlife. I am not sure what the terms were but there was an assumption, I suppose, that these bloggers would post about how yummy and delicious the products were… genius marketing given how far and wide vegan food blogs reach. But the whole ordeal left a bad taste in my mouth. After seeing a posting from the Urban Vegan, who often had Lightlife postings, I cracked. I stated my opinion that Lightlife is not really a vegan product by way of commenting on her blog.
Now, I forget exactly what I said when I posted my comment to the Urban Vegan but I’m sure it was both passionate and tactless, as these characteristics, once and awhile, mark my talking about veganism… plus, I remember her quipping back defensively. Ever since then, I have pushed the issue out of my mind. I don’t like upsetting people, especially vegan folks- no offense, non-vegans.
But yeah, Lightlife isn’t vegan.
That’s all. I just needed to purge my thoughts on this.
Vegan Reporting By Location
