crack the plates

My dear friend Yuki had a birthday last weekend and I brought food as a gift. Yuki and I have known each other for a few years, but since I moved back from Indiana in January we’ve become particularly close. Amid a dismal job market, our long talks inspired me to create Kandai Cakery in February. While she encouraged me to reach out to the community and sell my creations privately, she also invited me to sell them at Nakato, where my petite dorayaki with homemade anko were offered alongside kuro-goma (black sesame) and kinako (toasted soy flour; very dulce de leche) soy-based ice creams by High Road Craft Ice Cream:

organic cake with black sesame seeds, filled with old-fashioned homemade anko (sweet azuki bean paste)

Though I’ve switched gears from sweets to the meal delivery full-time, Yuki has made an indelible impression on my life, giving me strength & confidence in my darkest hours. How better to honor her graciousness and generosity than with a birthday meal? When I asked her about it over brunch a few weeks ago, she specifically requested beets – and then followed up with adjectives like fresh, green, crisp, crunchy. I know she’s followed a mostly raw diet in the past, so I grabbed my Ani Phyo books and got to work.

The menu:

• Love is Love Farm roasted sweet peppers hummus with Crudités
• Vietnamese cabbage salad with mint from my back porch
• Quinoa tabbouleh in organic red cabbage cups
• Rawvioli – fresh cashew cheese sandwiched between mandolined yellow beets, served with raw cherry tomato marinara
• Ani’s rich chocolate cake with fudge frosting

Many of the items were locally sourced all of the ingredients were organic. The chocolate was fair-trade.

***

***

***

I ran out of fresh basil so I had to sprinkle it with my organic freeze-dried stuff! Not aesthetically pleasing; thankfully it got doused in blushing cherry tomato sauce. Next time I will plan ahead better!

This cake presented an ideological problem for me. I am a very open-minded and excitable cook, but if there’s one type of food I can be slightly blasé about, it’s raw food. It’s not that I don’t love to eat it, it’s that sometimes when I’m reading raw food cookbooks I feel sad because so many of the recipes seem like the palest shadows of traditional recipes that they’re trying to “healthify”. Reading recipes for “pancakes” or “biscuits” that have to sit in a food dehydrator for seven to ten hours or “rice” made out of nuts and turnips seems overly fussy, stretching the idea too far for my taste.

So it was with this attitude that I went into Ani’s “chocolate fudge cake” recipe in Ani’s Raw Food Desserts. Shaking my head, I wrote out the recipe for “cake” made of walnuts, cocoa powder, salt and dates; frosting comprised of dates, agave nectar, avocado and cocoa. Just six ingredients. As I jotted notes and alterations in my cook’s notebook, I was so dubious that I actually continued to write “cake” and “frosting” in quotes. No way this is going to turn into anything delicious. It would take a miracle. This is not cake.

and yet, and yet, and yet. It was tremendous. The frosting was perfectly fudgy; the cake, a bit crumbly at first, tasted rich and incredibly decadent. The fresh, organic raspberries made everything sing. Because of its high fat content, the small cake (and petite servings) happily served all eight of Yuki’s guests, who gushed over all the food to the point of embarrassment. (For serious: it’s one thing to be complimented on a dish you tended for hours, but raw food you threw together in much less? Something else entirely!) If I had another jar of buttery, melty, caramelly medjools I’d make the darn thing again right now.

Being proven wrong feels awesome and tastes even better. Happy birthday, Yuki!!

I had considered tacking on this report as a PPS to the cookie sammiches one, but these seitan wings were so (expletive! expletive!) good that they deserve their own post. The culinary high point of Mellukah was definitely chef Aaron’s savoury fried bundles of gluten goodness, drenched in bright flavors. See the master at work:

General Tso’s-flavored

I swiftly pronounced these wings “the best vegan eating anyone could have in a 60-mi-radius of Richmond, Indiana, that night”. It’s the perfect junk food/every-once-in-a-while-treat for vegans & non-vegans alike, and, beyond the usual difficulty of seitan-making, it’s not that hard to pull together! Aaron used Isa’s recipe for “simple seitan” (itself a more manageable version of the recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance) from Veganomicon. Cooked & cooled, he

• allowed the seitan to separate where it felt natural, into wing-size chunks
• battered the pieces in a mixture of flour, nutritional yeast, salt, and herbs
• and friiieed them in about an inch of oil til golden

Mmmmm!!

Since he had to make everything early, he simply re-crisped the fully-cooked-and-fried seitan wings in the oven for about 12 minutes (turning halfway) at 350 just before serving. Toss well in your favorite sauce and serve.

Note: this is, without a doubt, perfect fourth of july/summer al fresco food:

Aaron keeps a blog at http://blog.amhill.net/

NOTE: Read the comments section of the post for further instruction from Aaron

Saturday afternoon: in a blithe, baking, birthday mood, monogrammed peanut butter chocolate chip cookie sammiches were born! Saturday being my dad’s 54th birthday, Mellukah, and close to my dearest Monica’s big day, too, I was inspired to make some scrumptious sweets. It started off simply enough with Isa’s recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance for big gigantoid crunchy peanut-butter cookies, when halfway through baking I decided they’d be cuter with some carefully-placed chocolate chips. And having done that, I mused, why not just whip up some vegan chocolate buttercream & make gigantic cookie sandwiches? And then roll the sides of the cookies (where the buttercream hung out) in festive sprinklies to make it sparkle? Hell yeah that sounds like a happy birthday! Check ‘em out:

The first two batches rest sweetly by the Good Luck Cooking Witch.

Note: I have some big ol’ hands.

I couldn’t resist a close-up…

…or the fantasy of cookies for miles…

M is for cookie, for Moskowitz, for Monica, for Mel!

Detail on the sprinkle apocalypse…

These friends were as fun to make as they were to look at. Easy, too! First, follow the great recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance for the aforementioned cookies. Instead of using vanilla soymilk as Isa suggests, I tried So Delicious’ new vanilla coconut milk. (Richmond folks–Kroger has it on sale now and with a manufacturer’s coupon, so you can try a half gallon for $1.75, as I did.) Perfect substitution! Bake cookies for about 10 minutes, pull ‘em out, dot with chocolate chips (pointy side down, if I may), and bake another four minutes.

The cookies need a good amount of time to rest, so cool yer jets and whip up a frosting. I mixed 2 cups of sifted vegan powdered sugar with about, eh, 1/3-1/2 cup cocoa powder & a pinch of salt, set aside, and in a large mixing bowl creamed a couple tablespoons of room-temp eBal (earth balance). I added the sugar mixture back to the eBal bowl and used my hand-mixer to blend it along with another tablespoon of vanilla coconut milk & some vanilla extract. Note: since you’re using this as a filling, don’t let your frosting get too runny! Add liquids extremely slow & cautiously, & err on the side of stiffness.

My kitchen was blazing hot, so I had to let the cookies firm up in the fridge. Once they were ready I smeared one side with a generous amount of chocolate buttercream, mashed ‘em together, and rolled the sides in a handful of sprinkles. If you eschew AC too, pop ‘em in your fridge til you’re ready to make someone’s day!

PS. To my dad, Adjua, Benji & my little brother’s gorgeous future wife: I didn’t forget your birthdays, it’s just too hot to mail these cookies! Consider this note a baked goods IOU.

PPS. Oh, and this:

First, the most important news: our katze Unix seems to be doing much better today than she has since the fleabath incident Sunday night. (Worrisomely, she’d put her appetite on hold and would mew loudly every time we touched her). She’s in fine furry form tonight, though, and is currently sitting in my lap encumbering my typing. And oh, how soft and flea-free her tortoiseshell fur is! (Alas, we’ll still be heading to the V-E-T in the morning.)

Tonight’s dinner was generously provided by friends N & J in celebration of Nate’s upcoming birthday. As a special surprise, they prepared some sushi–Nate’s favorite–with avocado, carrot, and cucumber. (I brought over the materials to make a quick miso–red miso paste by Westbrae, cellophane noodles from Jungle Jim’s, japanese-style firm tofu, two cloves of garlic sliced thin and some kombu kelp.) Observe the taller N coach the shorter one on the wily ways of sushi:

Those are taller N’s in the foreground (second picture). Little N…well, let’s just say he could do with a little more larnin’:

But hey, who am I to judge? I didn’t even try! On that note…

In the interest of full disclosure (because this blog ought not be about my triumphs only, but about my royal struggles too), I will admit that I f-ed up not one but TWO desserts tonight. I fail so comprehensibly so infrequently that it is quite marvellous that I was able to do it twice in one evening. Still, I admit: I ruined some rice pudding by using short-grain BROWN rice and not cooking it through; mere minutes after wiping the apron of this masterpiece, I whipped up some chocolate pudding that didn’t set because my arrowroot was so expired it had completely lost its potency. Oops?

Le sigh.

Hope you’ll check out tomorrow’s update on cooking for Peace Forum: butternut squash soup that isn’t (DUN DUN DUN) …pureed!!! Better yet, just come have lunch! Tomorrow’s talk: “One Hill at a Time: Supporting Palestinian Nonviolent Resistance at Al Tuwani.”