(Vegan) Pumpkin Muffins

Well, they are only pumpkin in shape, and they may lean a bit closer to cupcake than truly muffin, but "Vegan, Pumpkin Shaped, Apple Spiced, Cupcake Muffins" seemed a bit lengthy of a title. We sort of made this recipe up as we went along... It's not a big, crazy stretch on your basic muffin / cupcake, but they came out sooo tasty, so I wanted to share. We used a a silicone pumpkin shaped baking mold that Kaia picked out at a thrift store, and Kaia of course added and mixed all the ingredients.This recipe made roughly 24 muffins.

Ingredients:

•2 C Soy Milk

•2 tsp Apple Cider Vinegar

•1 C Sugar

•¼ C Brown Sugar

•4 tsp Vanilla Extract

 •⅔ C Canola / Vegetable Oil

•1 Tbsp Ground Cinnamon

•Pinch Nutmeg

•¼ C Applesauce 

•2 ½ C White Wheat Flour

•1 ½ tsp Baking Powder

•1 tsp Baking Soda

•½ tsp Salt

Directions:

1. Preheat Oven to 350° F
2. Mix the soy milk and apple cider vinegar, then give it a few minutes to curdle.
3. Into the soy milk and apple cider vinegar mixture, beat in you sugar, vanilla, oil, cinnamon, applesauce, and nutmeg.
4. While mixing, add in slowly (or sift,) the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Stir until relatively full.
5. Grease up molds, (or use cupcake liners,) and fill to about ⅔ full.
6. Bake for about 20 minutes, or until done.
7. Let cool before icing.

I went light on icing, only adding faces and stems. They passed the kid test with flying colours, and disappeared far faster than I expected. We're going to make another batch or two for our upcoming Halloween party. :)

Blackberry Coconut Milk Ice Cream in a Bag!

How did I not know you could make ice cream in a bag? I have no idea, but it was delicious! I was not sure how it would work out being vegan and using coconut milk instead of cream, but we thought we'd give it a go.
 

Armed with two sandwich bags filled with a tablespoon each of sugar, we went out and picked some fresh, juicy blackberries from our yard. We threw them in with the sugar and Kaia happily smooshed them all together.
 

 To that we added a teaspoon of vanilla and half a can of coconut milk to each bag, and Kaia smooshed those all together, too. We put each mixture into a large bag half filled with ice and perhaps a 1/3 Cup of salt, and Kaia shook, danced, and jumped with it for several minutes. After that, she proclaimed it too cold, and I shook the bag for a few more minutes.
 

We rinsed the salt off the bags and opened them up. Oh, what pretty ice cream, and oh! Was it good! We ate one bag and put the other in the freezer for another day. I wonder how you could do this without using plastic bags? I think the mixture at least could go in a glass jar, but I'm at a loss when it comes to the ice. If anyone knows, please share! Kaia wants to make more (of course!) and I would rather not do it in plastic.

Chocolates for Easter

So I'm a little behind. Again. Who's surprised? I'm not surprised. Anyway, we made chocolates for Easter. Not starting from grinding the beans kind of felt like cheating and makes it hard to me to feel entirely comfortable saying we "made" them, but it was fun. We had some organic baking chocolate we'd got on clearance and it was... well, it had probably seen better days. Kaia unwrapped all the chocolate bars.

We added sugar and melted it all in a pot, Kaia kept it stirred.
 

 Once up to temp, it took a really long time to cool. Kaia started getting very tired, so while we waited for it to be cool enough to pour in the molds, we started playing with the ingredients we had out to add to the chocolates. We dipped almonds in the melted chocolate and then into coconut. They were yummy!

 We have a mold that was my grandmother's - roosters, eggs, and rabbits. It was neat to be making chocolates in the same mold she used. As we filled the molds, Kaia added almonds and coconuts to them.

We picked up a second mold at a thrift store with a variety of neat shapes.

We made chocolate suckers, too. I put either a cereal puff, a gummy bunny, or a jelly bean in each one before pouring the chocolate in. They ended up being mostly enveloped by the chocolate, so in the future I think I will stick them on afterward with a bit of melted chocolate. Not that this bothered the kids. :)

We put the almonds and chocolates in mini muffin papers and packed them in little boxes to give to family and friends.

I cut squares of plastic wrap to wrap up the suckers and tied them with twisty tie bows.

They were all well received and came out delicious, we will definitely be making more!

Making Rock Candy

I'm secretly attempting to build up a little stash of treats for the girls' Easter baskets, shh! So we're making some yummies, and each time a few of them mysteriously disappear... so far unnoticed. Kaia had yet to make rock candy, and hasn't everyone got to make rock candy at least once? So we started there. We poured 3 cups of sugar and 1 cup of water into a pan.

Over high heat, Kaia stirred it until all the sugar dissolved.

While we waited for the water to boil, Kaia prepared food colouring and flavouring in jars.

We used lime juice in the green, lemon juice in the yellow, spearmint in blue, and orange oil in the orange. (Okay, it ended up being pretty red... Kaia got a little overzealous with the red food colouring.) They smelled sooo delicious, Kaia couldn't stop sniffing each jar over and over while we waited. I had to convince her that they wouldn't taste very good to drink.

When the sugar water mixture came to boil we removed it from the stove and poured it into the jars. We gave them a stir and set them in the fridge to cool. While they were cooling, we prepared some cotton kitchen twine by tying it to sticks, dipping the strings into the sugar water mixture, and taping them to the counter to dry. 

 When the mixture seemed a bit cooler than room temperature, we took the jars out and hung the strings in them so that they didn't touch the bottom or sides. The following picture was taken the next day, and we knew something was wrong. Most of the sugar was separated from the water.

We waited anyway, and a week and a half later we had these pretty funky looking rock candies. Not the prettiest rock candy I've ever seen, something is definitely amiss, but tasty none the less!

We are now the proud owners of an actual candy thermometer, so I think we shall be trying this project again with a bit more precision.

Green Tomatoes

So, despite knowing about the oncoming freeze in advance, and even though we got our booties out there and staked and covered everything with blankets ahead of time, regardless of us both having just come down utterly sick, everything froze. :( Kaia and I went out the next morning to pull the blankets off to be greeted with this:

We had a sad, but Kaia has been dying to pick those tomatoes since they started fruiting, so she was very excited to finally get to do so. And we found a real monster of a tomato, too! Kaia loved it.

We brought them in and turned a portion of them into green tomato pizza at Kaia's request.

We made a green tomato sauce...

 Then we made a "cream cheese" sauce, and topped it with roasted garlic and big slices of fresh green tomatoes. Mmm!

 It was super delicious! Now we just need to figure out what to do with the rest! Salsa? Green tomato and apple chutney? I've been eying that recipe. Any suggestions? :)

Dying to Sew

Ahhahaha.. er.. sorry, but.. come on, it had to be done. I didn't feel like I could find any great info without picking up a book on dying... so... instead of doing that, I winged it, of course. The dye preparations - Spinach, Beets and Tea, Coffee Grounds and Onion Skins, and Carrot tops and Goldenrod Flowers.

Glowing, OoooOOoOoooo! (Well.. it was fun.)

Boiling

Finished!

Boiled for an hour and a half, scrap material left in to dye over night. Apparently I didn't take a picture of the swatches. Well, everything but the spinach "worked". The brown was very pale, though I'm sure I know why. I just couldn't bring myself to sacrifice that much of my beloved coffee to the cause, so I used all used grounds and one tablespoon new grounds. I'm going to try adding walnut to it. The yellow was also pretty pale, I added turmeric. The purple is literally 3 dips of the dipstick of gentian violet, which came out very bright. The spinach did almost nothing. I don't think I used nearly enough. You're supposed to be getting the chlorophyll out of it and since I have some liquid chlorophyll I'm just going to use some of that. Same thing, less work, ...right? 

Take 2! The daycare kids had great fun stirring the onesies and a tea towel in a big bucket of vinegar water, and then putting them into the dyes.

 The onesies in their dye baths, left them in overnight.

 They came out really nice! The pale violet onesie I took out after a couple hours, the darker was in overnight, and I tied it with a rubber band.

Kaia in her turmeric dyed shirt and chlorophyll dyed jacket.

Jam!

Jam, indeed. We picked blackberries in the front yard yesterday and made a bunch of jam. There are many more berries not ripe yet, too. There were enough for us to make a ton of wine last year, but, alas, don't think we're up for it this year. The blueberry wine was better anyway. The daycare kids had it on their PB&Js today, they were so thrilled!
 

Waiting for the berries to cook, Kaia has a snack. :)