Vegan Gingerbread Kids

This recipe is my vegan adaptation of a traditional recipe found in the Alpha-Bakery, Gold Medal's Children's Cookbook. It's not perfect eating (boo flour boo), but I've made the recipe vegan using coconut oil instead of shortening and it makes a cookie that you can decorate with icing and/or build Gingerbread tardises out of.

Vegan Gingerbread Cookie Dough

1/2 cup of brown sugar
1/2 cup of dark brown molasses
1/2 cup of coconut oil (softened, but  not melted)
1/4 cup of water
3/4 tsp salt
3/4 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp allspice
1/2 tsp baking soda
2.5 cups of white flour

1. Beat sugar, molasses, coconut oil and water in large bowl with electric mixer until relatively smooth. (Coconut oil will probably make tiny little lumps--s'ok. Deal.)

2. Add rest of ingredients to make dough

3. You can optionally chill the dough for 2 hours to make roll-out cookies.

4. Shape your cookies to be about 1/4" thick.

5. Bake at 375 degrees for 8-10 minutes.

6. Makes about 5 or 6 biggish cookie shapes that will stay relatively puffy but will harden as they cool. Once they harden, you can decorate them.

We made gingerbread sonic screwdrivers and daleks. We ate them, though. This is what remains.

Dairy-Free Instant Chocolate Pudding

A lot of recipes for dairy-free pudding require you to have in your possession a ripe avocado. In life, ripe avocados are like four-leaf clovers. But I've recently learned that there is bottled avocado oil!

Dairy-Free Instant Chocolate Pudding

1 14 oz. box of silken tofu (here from Trader Joe's)
1/2 cup avocado oil
3-5 tablespoons of brown sugar
1/2 cup of cocoa powder
1 tsp vanilla extract

Dump all ingredients into a blender and blend until smooth (or use an immersion blender). I can't recommend a nutrilbullet enough for this kind of task, though.

Chocolate "Trust Me" Black Bean Fudge

This is a recipe that requires a special title. Tell someone you made black bean fudge and they're probably going to go Mr. Yuck on you and totally shoot it down. So, you know, trust me. It's fucking awesome.

This fudge contains no dairy. It contains two cans of black beans. It's high-fiber, high-protein, dairy-free and a great, nay, excellent source of coconut oil fats.

Chocolate "Trust Me" Black Bean Fudge
(adapted from Whole New Mom)

• 2 cans of black beans (rinsed), or 3.5 cups of cooked black beans
• 3/4 cup of coconut oil
• 1 cup of cocoa powder
• 1 cup of sugar (can be reduced to your preferences)
• 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract
• Pinch of salt (to taste)

Blend all the ingredients in your blender, Nutribullet or Vitamix.

Pour into a bowl and chill for at least two hours (longer if your coconut oil is liquid when you started).

 The mixture will be pretty hard (think soft fudge or chocolate icing). 

Two-Ingredient White Chocolate Tofu Pudding

Two ingredients. It's not really clean eating, per se, because come on. White chocolate isn't exactly good for you. Even if it is from Whole Foods. But it makes tofu kid-friendly, so why not?

Ingredients:

1 12 oz bag of white chocolate
2 12 oz boxes of silken tofu (silken, not firm), drained

In a double boiler (fancy-pants way of saying any pan within a pan), melt the chocolate over an inch of water. Ok, what does that mean? Pour an inch of water into a pan. Boil it. Place another pan with the chocolate literally into that pan with the water. Melt the chocolate. I know, it's confusing.

Scrape the molten chocolate into a blender along with the drained tofu. Blend.

Voila. High-protein white chocolate tofu pudding.

No-Bake Almond Oat Coconut Date Bars

Long hiatus. Moved to California. Now have access to a bigger and grander kitchen that came already stocked with all kinds of exotic flours and dried beans and nuts and shrugs as to what to do with them. Yay for me! Yay for you. Yay for us.

Anyway, so today I found a bag of dates in the pantry. Dates are basically ugly balls of natural sugar with pesky little seeds that you have to take care to remove. To be frank, I've never actually used dates before. These are not in my usual repertoire of food objects, so today is an experiment.

To make these bars, you'll need a food processor. I used my brand new Nutribullet which I love because when it's not being used to create edible things, it's being used to facilitate my consumption of absurd amounts of greens that I would otherwise never put into my system. I'd dedicate a blog entry to it, but honestly,  "handful of spinach and a banana..." not very interesting. 

So, right, food processor. 

No-Bake Almond Oat Coconut Date Bars 

(adapted recipe from Oh She Glows)

• 1.5 cups of almond meal (ground almonds)
• 1.5 cups of oats
• 1/2 tsp. sea salt (or kosher salt or any salt, whatever, who cares)
• 10 pitted dates
• 1/4 cup coconut oil

Filling (make separately)

• 30 pitted dates
• 1/2 cup water

1. Process the almonds, oats, 10 pitted dates and salt until you get a crumbly meal. Then add the coconut oil (melt first if solidified). 

2. Press about 1/4 of the mixture into the bottom of a glass-bottomed 8x8" pan. 

3. Process the remaining 30 pitted dates with 1/2 cup of water until you get a sticky date goo. (Mmmm, goo.)

4. Press the goo into the pan, over your pressed meal layer. 

5. Press the remaining meal over the goo layer.

6. Refridgerate at least 1 hour, preferably 8-10 hours.

7. Don't do what I did which was to wait 45 minutes and be super impatient about it because you're wicked impatient because you'll get something crumbly and messy like what you see below and not the professional-looking bars that other bloggers seem to achieve. But it tastes good.

(mmm. goo.)

Whipped Coconut Cream

Whipped cream is delicious. It's pretty easy to buy the crap in the can, but at $2 for what amounts to like maybe a cup of actual product, it's not cost-effective (at least not the way I eat whipped cream because come on, that shit is ambrosia). So you want to make it at home to get the bigger bang for your buck (and avoid whatever preservatives and stabilizer crap they put in there).Traditional whipped heavy cream, however, sucks because 1) no one ever just has  a carton of heavy cream just sitting around and 2) it's dairy and sometimes dairy just doesn't sit right with some people. 

So what about whipped cream you can make with a 99-cent can of coconut milk? Oh yeah. Possible.

So next time you go grocery shopping, stick a can or two of full-fat coconut milk in the fridge. Forget about them.

Then when you want whipped cream, you can say, "Oh yeah! I have coconut milk in the fridge. Hellz yeah. Good job, self. Way to listen to Holly. She's so smart and nice and full of good ideas."

So for this recipe you need a can of coconut milk and your choice of sweetener. Today I'm using honey, but you could just as easily swap it out for sugar. Note: though this is plant-based, this stuff is not low-fat. Coconut cream is still cream. 

Whipped Coconut Cream

1 can of chilled coconut milk (hugely important this be chilled because science)

2 tablespoons of honey (or sugar)

The first step is to separate the cream from the water. To do this, just open the can and drain out the liquid into a separate container. You can drink that stuff. Let me tell you: it tastes exactly like coconut water. 

So what remains now is the cream. As you can see, it's thick, fatty, fatty stuff. 

So then we whip it and the honey on your mixer's highest setting for about 10 minutes. If I had a fancy-ass stand mixer, I could leave this sit and go do something more important, but since I don't, I stood there and read about the effect of porn consumption on men on my phone. Oh your mother didn't read about porn while she was cooking for you growing up? THAT'S BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T HAVE SMART PHONES BACK THEN.

Eventually it'll whip into whipped cream. You should know what whipped cream looks like but if you don't, here's a weirdly angelic shot of what it looks like sitting with its majestic halo atop some blackerry sorbet.

Frozen Greek Yogurt

So frozen yogurt. Frozen yogurt is sort of healthy. Kinda? I mean, it's better than eating a pint of heavy cream and egg yolks, sure, but it's still not really doing anything for you. A normal 1/2 cup serving of Pinkberry with no toppings weighs in at about 120 calories--virtually all of it carbohydrates that your body can't really distinguish from sugar anyway. And there's almost nothing in it nutritionally except a smidge of calcium. And me being the white-trash wunderkin, I can't understand how people throw away $5 on fancy coffee drinks let alone this shit. At least coffee is a drug.

And as my friends like telling  me, I am known for saying, "Hey, I can make that better at home" a lot. I'm kind of a dick about it. Mostly because I hate when people throw money away on stupid things but also because I can make that at home. Cheaper. And better for you.

How am I going to do it? Chobani. We're basically just going to take a container of Chobani and dump the entire thing into my ice cream maker. (Ok, you know how I said earlier this week I don't own any fancy kitchen crap? I lied. I have an ice cream maker. I have this one, specifically. It's pretty awesome because I make this recipe a lot. Maybe once a day in the summer time.)

Frozen Greek Yogurt

32 oz container of plain Greek Yogurt (fat-free or low-fat, doesn't matter)

1/4 cup sugar (optional)

1 tbs. vanilla extract (optional)

If you're using my ice cream maker, you just place the frozen ice cream chamber (what the hell is it called?) into your ice cream maker, dump the yogurt and other crap in and let it transmogrify. It'll look like this after about 20 minutes.

Then you can put stuff in it. Any stuff. Here I put in some stewed blackberries. Nom.

No fat and a cup of this stuff weighs in at maybe 200 calories and 24 grams of protein (OR HALF OF MY RECOMMENDED PROTEIN ALLOWANCE NEED FOR THE DAY, PEOPLE. FUCKING VEGETARIAN POWERHOUSE, HERE.)