Vegan cupcakes

Just wanted to do a quick post to recommend an amazing vegan cookbook (well baking book actually). Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World is an amazing little book by Isa Moscowitz and Terry Romero, the queens of vegan cooking. So far I've made their basic chocolate cupcake with chocolate buttercream frosting and an agave nectar cupcake recipe. Both were deliciously decadent and wonderful tasting as well as being really simple to make. I also really liked that they don't call for you to use "egg-replacement powder" as I find it a pain to get hold of and a bit on the weird side. These recipes are both stuck together with curdled soya milk (curdled with the addition of cider vinegar).

I made the agave nectar ones as a gift for someone who is diabetic as I had been informed that agave nectar has a lower GI level than ordinary sugar so should hopefully be less upsetting insulin-wise than normal cupcakes. Agave nectar, for those who don't know of it, is a syrup made form the same plant that they use for making tequilla! It is very sweet and a little smoky so I was interested to see how they turned out. The cupcakes were much more golden than ones made with ordinary sugar - they're picture at the top when they were fresh from the oven. As I'd never tried this recipe before I was really impressed. They're sweet without being cloying and with smoky sort of maple-ish flavour. I'd definitely make them again and the Skulls seemed to like them too....

Colourful cooking

Since going vegan I've really been enjoying how colourful my meals are when I start preparing vegetables for meals. For example the picture above is the beginning of a quick pasta dish I made. Just penne, tomato sauce and veggies but how lovely is it to look at. It was also pretty yummy to eat too!


Even when making something as simple as a sandwich (although sandwiches in Skull cottage are something of an art form which the SKulls take very seriously) its the vegetables that make it look really appetising.

Something vegan - tofu scramble

I thought it was about time to post something vegan as I'm really enjoying cooking all the new recipes I have gathered since changing my diet. However, I thought I'd best begin with something that lots of vegan blog and cookbook writers seem to consider to be a vegan staple - tofu scramble. The basic idea is to make something resembling scrambled egg but without any chicken ever having been involved.
The tofu I used for this was the firm variety (as opposed to silken tofu which resembles milk jelly) and I drained it (it comes in little sealed packages of liquid). I don't think you need to bother pressing the tofu for scramble as I like the scramble to be moist. When cooking tofu for other dishes I would press it to remove some more moisture and give it a better texture. You do this by draining it and then wrapping it in a very clean tea towel and sticking something heavy on top of it for an hour or so.

Now tofu is pretty bland tasting so even a recipe for a breakfast scramble calls for the use of some spices. But fear not spicey-phobes, this doesn't make the scramble spicey but just gives it a lovely savoury flavour. If you want a bit more pep then simply add a bit more of the spices and a nice pinch of cayenne or a fresh chilli.

Another ingredient which non-vegans may not be familiar with is nutritional yeast. These can be found in most health food shops and some supermarkets. Its not the same as the yeast you bake bread with or brewing yeast but is a good way of adding a savoury and faintly nutty/cheesey flavour.

This recipe is pretty flexible and you can add plenty of different vegetables (peppers, courgettes, baby spinach leaves, etc).

Serves 2

olive oil
1 small onion (chopped into small pieces)
1 fat clove garlic (diced)
75g mushrooms (thinly sliced)
225g tofu (drained)
2 tbsp nutritional yeast
1 1/2 tbsp lemon juice
1 small carrot grated (optional)

Spice blend
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp paprika
big pinch tumeric
1/2 tsp salt

Fry the onion in olive oil until softened. Add the the mushrooms and garlic and saute for about 5 minutes.

Add the spice blend and stir well. Add a little water to deglaze the pan if needed.

Crumble in the tofu and mix well. Don't mash it into tiny pieces but make sure it looks nicely crumbled and chunky (like scrambled egg).

Let it fry for about 10-15 minutes stirring occassionaly and adding splashes of water to stop from sticking too much and to keep the tofu from going too dry.

Add the lemon juice and yeast and mix well adding more water if necessary. Grate the carrot in if wanted (its mostly for colour).

Serve and enjoy (well I thought it was delicious!)

Something for the meat-eaters

There is now only the one meat-eater in the house and although he is generally happy with my vegan dinners he doesn't like to be deprived of a good ham sandwich.


Obviously we couldn't just buy a loaf of sliced-white and a packet of wafer-thin ham slices, oh no, not us. I mean, have you seen the price of cooked meat! So instead we bake our own bread and make some special ham. Here's a our normal loaf - half wholemeal and half white flour.

For the ham SkullC likes to buy a big piece of uncooked ham and we cook it ourselves. Now SkullC likes nice sweet ham so we cook 'Ham in Cola'. It's really easy:

Stick your ham into a big pan, cut up an onion and chuck that in too. Then pour in a big bottle of cola (not diet) and put the lid on.


Then simply bring to the boil, reduce to a simmer and cook for around 2 hours (or the time given on the packet). When cooked just remove from the liquid and allow to cool before shredding for sandwiches. This was today's very un-vegan sandwich of cheese, ham and mayo on homemade bread (SkullC doesn't really understand vegetables).

This saves lots of money compared to the pre-sliced stuff you get in the supermarket. I also used to do this as party dish - just take the cooked ham out of the pan and place in a foil-lined tray, spread with mustard and black treacle and roast in a very hot oven for about 20 minutes.

Delicious, well, I used like it and SkullC says its the best ham he has ever had! But nowadays, SkullA and I are trying not gag at all the meat pictures and promise to post something vegan soon!.

Twinkle

2009 begins with veganism and cider

After surviving our first year in the house we were filled with plans for 2009. We were contemplating querying the council about whether we would be allowed to keep chickens in our garden so we could have freshly laid eggs when I suddenly decided to change my diet from meat-eater to vegan so I don't know why I decided so abrubtly but decide I did and within a week I was totally vegan and I'm really happy with it. Two of the Skulls are already veggies (and one used to be vegan) and the other is happy to eat whatever is around. They all seem quite happy trying out my vegan cooking experiements and I'll be posting some recipes and things from time to time.

Meanwhile, the Skulls has decided they would like to try their hand at making their own alcohol. Luckily for them, back in the Autumn I had found a huge apple tree at my workplace that nobody seemed to be bothering with. The fruit was just dropping to the ground and rotting so I started gathering it up and bringing it home to make pies, cakes and apple sauce. In fact, there were so many apples that we had ended up with three huge boxes surplus to our pie requirements that were sitting outside. So the boys began making some cider.

Unfortunately we didn;t take any pictures but next time we brew a batch I'll do some lovely step by step pictures.

This involved chopping and pulping about a hundred apples and straining the resultant pulp through a seive into a big vat. To this juice was added yeast, sugar and a tin of apple concentrate before sticking it into the airing cupboard to ferment for about 6 days.

After checking the specific gravity with a hydrometer (the boys love their technical kit) to ensure fermentation had stopped the cider was siphoned into bottles, a teaspoon of sugar added to each bottle (to make it fizzy) and corked.

The bottles were then put back into the airing cupboard to ferment for a few more days in the warm before being put in a cold place (the shed) to stop fermentation and let the brew settle.

Well, this weekend was time for the first taste test. We took a couple of bottles over to a band practice in a friend's warehouse and I think it went down rather well.



Twinkle

Year 1 (an overview)

We actually moved into Skull Cottage about a year ago and it was the first time any of us had been in charge of a real live garden. The plot we had inherited with the house was a fairly small and scrubby suburban garden but came with its own advantages (greenhouse, shed, jasmine arch and elderflower trees) and disadvantages (pine trees overhead so lots of pinecones, rocks, weeds, slugs and woodlice).


The green trees you can see are mostly the elderflowers (and a hawthorn). The huge trunks with no tops in sight are absolutely enormous pine trees. They tower way above the house and are protected by law as they're pretty old.

Well, never the people to ignore experimentation fun we began our garden experiments straight away. Unfortunately we didn't keep pictorial or written records and we're kicking ourselves nowas it was good fun if not terribly successful. I (Twinkle) am about the only one who has any garden experience and thats only stuff I remember from back when I was a teenager and my parents gardened and loved to watch Gardeners' World so we were pretty naive and hopeless (to put it mildly).

We planted way more seeds that we could cope with and were terrible at remembering to weed and water. Our garden all seems to have been built over the place where slugs come to party - they ate everything! Despite this we did manage to get some things to grow and we loved doing it.

Here's a quick list of what did and didn't survive our neglectful hands:

Potatoes - grown from some leftover spuds from Tesco that had gone all sprouty these grew magnificently despite serious slug attack and the incessant rain. We harvested several bucketsfull of amazing tasting potatoes in about September.
Beans - all but one succumbed to slug attack and the surviver managed one bean!
Tomatoes - despite our occassional lapses in watering we managed to harvest plenty of cherry tomatoes and they were still going well into October.
Rhubarb - appeared from nowhere and survived everything. Bonus!
Chilli - We planted our seeds way to late so nothing there but we did get one plant from the garden centre which produced lots of tiny scorching fruits despite aphid nightmares!
Lettuce - slug doom! Will be grown indoors this year.
Sweetcorn - our garden miracle. I really didn't expect this to work as both the slugs and the woodlice seemed determined to eat these when put outside. But 4 out of 5 survived and grew and grew and grew! They produced loads of absolutely delicious cobs of corn which bear no resemblance to supermarket stuff. Amazing!

Here they are looking lovely


Needless to say, this year we shall be trying again!

Welcome to Skull Cottage

Hello dear guest and welcome to the Skull Cottage blog.

Obviously, our real house isn't called Skull cottage. We live in a non-descript semi in the outer suburbs of Cardiff, Wales but since its home to 'a bunch of long-haired metallers' it has been redubbed Skull Cottage.

We are all, essentially, a bunch of uber-geeks who like to experiment and play at a bit of DIY (be that in the kitchen, the recording studio or the garden) and this blog is an attempt at chronicling our various activities from guitar maintenance and black metal all the way to growing and cooking our our own vegetables and brewing our own beer.

A brief introduction to the household:

Twinkle - female, writer of the blog, librarian and chief cook (vegan).

The Skulls - 3 x males, all work from home.

SkullA - chief guitar tech, comic geek and all-round sci-fi troll (vegetarian).

SkullC - guitar geek, garden man and chief music know-it-all (meat-lover).

SkullP - code monkey, head of digital art and sandwich technician (vegetarian).

Plus two very spoilt cats - Groucho & Zephaniah

Well, that about sums us up so I'll get posting.

Twinkle