Hawaiian Baked Oatmeal

I rarely eat breakfast. When I was at school, I would eat a quick bowl of cereal before running off to class, and on the weekends, I’ll admit I probably wasn’t in the breakfast mood after a late night of consuming alcohol. Now That I’m unemployed and living back at home (kinda pathetic sounding, I know, but I’m looking!) I don’t wake up in time to eat breakfast. However when I woke up today, no matter that it was 10 o’clock, I wanted oatmeal.

I was planning on baking up some lemon macadamia cupcakes, but my mom, who would be the only person in the house who would help me eat them, just left on a trip to India. So I decided to hold off.

I was feeling adventurous today and wanted to make an oatmeal I had never had before. One of my favorite bloggers, Chocolate Covered Katie always makes the most delicious looking oatmeals, so I decided to try a spin off of her ‘boatmeal‘ or baked oatmeal.

I didn’t have any pumpkin, but I did have this:

Have you ever tried this? I discovered it yesterday… in my fridge. It’s sooo good, and it tastes just like regular yogurt! This has to be my favorite type of soygurt (=soy yogurt) i’ve ever tried. Of course, nothing compares to coconut milk yogurt, my absolute favorite, but little grocery store only sells one type of dairy free yogurt. (But now i’m going to have to find out where my mom buys this stuff!)

Anyway, back to the oatmeal. I decided I did not want to bake the soygurt in the oatmeal, What if it curdled or tasted gross? Then I would have ruined the last container of this deliciousness! So, I just let the key lime pie flavor influence me. I made a banana, pineapple, and coconut oatmeal. And it was delicious, if I do say so myself!

Baked Hawaiian Oatmeal

1/2 cup rolled oats
1/3 cup soy milk
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 pinch salt
1/2 banana, mushed up
1/4 cup pineapple tidbits
1 tablespoon coconut butter

Mix all the ingredients together, and put them in a small baking dish. (I used 2 small ramekins)  Bake at 375 degrees for 15 minutes, then broil for about 3 more minutes.
I topped mine with a big ‘ol dollop  of silk live key lime pie yogurt (Of course!) a drizzle of more coconut butter, more pineapple tidbits, and a few chopped up macadamia nuts. It was sooo good!

It was so good, the warm oatmeal with both cold and warm pineapple, and cold oatmeal! yummmy! Here’s another shot, just in case you need some more convincing:

I wish it could have had a little more variety color wise, but I’m not complaining.  It was gooey nummy heaven. I hope you all try this!

p.s.- I changed the layout of the blog… The old one just wasn’t me… And I wanted something a little more basic and streamline.

Banana Cupcakes

With creamy chocolate ganache filling and not too sweet peanut butter cream cheese frosting, to be exact.

These are by far one of my favorite cupcakes. And the dairy and eggs aren’t even missed!

Banana Cupcakes

1 cup soy milk
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons cornstarch
3/4 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup canola oil
3/4 cup sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 banana, mushed up

Directions:
Mix together soy milk and vinegar, and let curdle. Once curdled, add oil, sugar, vanilla, and banana, mix about 3 minutes.

Add the dry ingredients, and mix until just incorporated. Fill 12 cupcake liners with the batter, and bake at 350 degrees F for about 18 minutes.

Chocolate Ganache

1/2 cup bittersweet chocolate
1/4 cup soy milk

Directions:
Simmer soy milk on stove. If chocolate  isn’t already in small pieces, chop up so it melts quicker.

Remove the simmering milk from the stove, and pour over chopped chocolate. Let sit for about 4 minutes, then whisk until smooth. If there are still chunks of chocolate, microwave for 15 second intervals stirring in between until all is melted.

Peanut Butter Cream Cheese Frosting:

8 oz. dairy-free cream cheese (I use the tofutti brand, It’s the only kind they carry in my grocery store)
2 tablespoons margarine or dairy-free butter substitute
1/2 cup smooth peanut butter
1 cup powdered sugar

Directions:
Beat cream cheese, margarine, and peanut butter until smooth and fluffy. Add powdered sugar, and beat until all the ingredients are incorporated.

How To assemble the cupcake:

Directions:
Using a paring knife or melon baller, cut/scoop a small hole out of the top of the cupcake, and pipe or spoon a dollop of ganache. You can cover this with a slice of banana, a thin piece of the cake you cut out, or just leave it open.

Pipe frosting on top. I used a lot of frosting on these, the frosting only uses about one cup of powdered sugar (while a lot of recipes use close to 4!) So it’s not overly sweet. If you do want to make it sweeter however, feel free to add as much sugar as you like.

To decorate, I just drizzled some of the extra ganache on top. The cupcake on the far right has a pulled sugar garnish, that I made at school and brought back with me. You could also pipe on some peanut butter or sprinkle some chopped peanuts on top as well.

The World’s Greatest Chocolate Cupcake

… or chocolate peppermint cupcake I should say. And it’s vegan to boot. ; )

Once again, I got the base cupcake and frosting recipe from my favorite, Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. The frosting is a chocolate mousse- and it contains- get this, tofu! I made some of these for one of my mom’s church events, and all those tofu/vegan wary people thought they were to die for, and were shocked they were vegan!

Vegan Chocolate Peppermint Cupcakes:
Makes 12 cupcakes

Ingredients:
1 cup  soy milk
1 teaspoon vinegar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup canola oil2 teaspoons peppermint extract
1 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup cocoa powder
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

Directions:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees, and prepare your muffin tin with liners.

Mix together the soy milk and vinegar, let curdle for several minutes.  Once curdled, add the oil, sugar, and peppermint extract and beat until foamy.

Add all the dry ingredients in two additions, and beat until there are no large lumps in the batter.

Dish out into the cupcake liners, and bake about 20 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean. Let cool before frosting.

Amazing Chocolate Mousse Frosting

Ingredients:
1 (12.3oz) package of firm silken tofu
1/4 cup plain soy milk
2 tablespoons agave syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla extract (you could use peppermint, but I didn’t want the peppermint to overpower the cupcakes)
12 oz. semisweet chocolate chips

Directions:
Melt the chocolate. Let cool for about 5 minutes.

Add the tofu, soy milk, agave, and vanilla to the blender and blend until smooth. Add the chocolate, and blend until incorporated.

Refrigerate for about an hour, until firm.

Pipe onto cupcakes, and sprinkle with crushed up candy canes if desired. It’s the perfect holiday treat. I do realize, the holidays are over : / Guess you’ll have to save this one for next year. Although, It is a great way to use up those leftover candy canes. I know my grocery store has carts full of them at the checkout that they give away for free once Christmas is over.

I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately looking for jobs, as well as entering some baking contests. One is the Chocolate Adventure Contest, which ended yesterday. The other is the ZenSoy Contest at GoDairyFree.org. It’s an amazing website if you are lactose intolerant or have a milk allergy. This contest ends January 15th, I highly recommend you check it out! I’m keeping my lips sealed on my entries for these contests however. Keep your fingers crossed for me!

My next post I’m going to give ya’ll the recipe for a delicious Banana cupcake with ganache filling, and peanut butter cream cheese frosting! See you soon!

Cinnamon Muffins

A few years ago my mom and I spent some time in Portland Maine  as well as Nova Scotia and New Brunswick Canada with some family friends. We had a blast, It was such a lovely area.

My friend and I posing for a photo in our room at a cute bed and breakfast in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

We were in Portland for about 3 days, and each morning we would go to an indoor market (I’m not sure exactly what it’s called, maybe someone knows?) And one bakery there made these delicious cinnamon muffins. They weren’t just normal cinnamon muffins however- they had little clusters of cinnamon sugar inside them. Unfortunately, this bakery only made 3 of these muffins every day, so we couldn’t stock up. I’ve been searching high and low for a way to recreate these muffins, and I’ve come pretty close, but their not exactly the same. So if anyone knows the secret- please let me know!

After years of looking up how to make these, I found these in a King Arthur catalogue:

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. It kind of looks like dog food. But it’s not. They’re cinnamon flav-r-bites. And they are delicious. 

And as luck would have it, they had a cinnamon muffin recipe on the back! Well actually, it was a cinnamon apple muffin recipe, but I left the apples out trying to recreate my favorite cinnamon muffin. But I’m sure throwing the apple in would be delicious as well.

I’ve slightly altered the recipe to make it dairy-free. The recipe originally called for one cup of buttermilk, but I’ve replaced it with one cup soy milk and a teaspoon of vinegar.  It’s a similar buttermilk solution to my Strawberry Kiwi Cupcakes recipe. And I’ve also used Earth Balance (Or Futter (=fake butter) as we call it in my house)  instead of regular butter, but feel free to use what you like.

Cinnamon Muffins
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup unsalted butter (or futter)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 large egg
1 cup soy milk
1 teaspoon vinegar
3/4 cup cinnamon flav-r-bites
Optional: 1 apple, peeled, cored, and chopped

Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F, and prepare your muffin tin with liners.

Add the vinegar to the milk and let sit for a few minutes allowing it to curdle.

Beat the butter with sugars until fluffy. Add the egg and mix well, stopping to scrape the bowl along the way. Add the curdled milk and mix well.

Add the dry ingredients, and once they are incorporated add the cinnamon bits and apple, if using.

Portion into muffin tins, It should make 12 muffins. Put them in the oven and bake for 10 minutes, then reduce the heat of the oven to 400 degrees. Bake for 10 more minutes.

Don’t be too worried if they get dark, the brown sugar and wheat flour make them dark naturally.

These really turned out to be excellent muffins. I’m excited to use this as a base recipe and play around with the flavors. It’s not an extremely powerful cinnamon flavor either, my brother  isn’t a huge fan of cinnamon and he loved these. If you wanted a more pronounced cinnamon flavor, try adding some powdered cinnamon in with the dry ingredients.

And if anyone has any idea what cinnamon sugar clusters the bakery in Maine used, please let me know!

Strawberry Kiwi Cupcakes

Did anybody else drink Caprisun drink pouches when they were kids? I was in love with them. Especially the strawberry kiwi flavor. It was the only one I would drink most of the time, and I would go through boxes of the stuff every week!

And with that, began my love affair with everything strawberry kiwi. Any food or drink that had those two flavors in it- I was sure to like.

Over the years however, I stopped drinking juice bags and boxes, and I moved on. It wasn’t until recently that it came back into my world. I was making cupcakes for my mother’s church and when thinking up flavors she suggested making a strawberry kiwi one. I knew I had to try it.

So here it is, the very first recipe on my blog, Strawberry Kiwi Cupcakes. (Kiwi cupcakes with strawberry frosting) I only have a picture of the finished project, In future posts I plan on providing a lot more photos.

For the Kiwi Cupcakes: (Makes 12)

I used the vanilla cupcake receipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World and made a few changes. (Do you own this book? I was skeptical about vegan cupcakes at first- I had tried some vegan baking in the past and it didn’t always turn out, but the cupcakes and frostings in this book are better than non-vegan ones!

1 cup soy milk
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
1 ¼ cup all-purpose flour
2 tbsp cornstarch
¾ tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
¼ tsp salt
1/3 cup canola oil.
¾ cup granulated sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
3 kiwis

Preheat the oven to 350 and prepare your muffin tins with liners

1. Mix together the soy milk and vinegar and let sit for a few minutes, allowing it to curdle.
2. Mix together the flower, cornstarch, powder, soda and salt.
3. In the bowl of your mixer, mix together the oil, sugar and curdled soy milk.
4. Mix in the dry ingredients, just until everything is combined.
5. Peel all three kiwis, and smash two of them with a fork, or spin them in a magic bullet or blender for a few seconds.
6. Dice the third kiwi into small pieces.
7. Mix both the smooshed kiwi and the diced kiwi into the batter.
8. Fill cupcake tins ¾ full and bake for about 20-25 minutes, or until they spring back when you poke them.

Now for the strawberry frosting. You can check out this link to the Basic Italian Buttercream to make the base frosting recipe. To make it taste like strawberry, you could add strawberry extract, but I prefer to take about a cup of frozen or fresh strawberries and blend them in a magic bullet or blender until there are no more chunks. I then fold this in to my buttercream, reserving a tablespoon or two to drizzle on top.

You’ll probably need to work the strawberry puree into the frosting  a little, at first it will look like it won’t mix together, but get out your whisk and some elbow grease and it’ll be delicious : )

To finish off these cupcakes I dehydrated some kiwi slices and drizzle on some of the leftover strawberry sauce.