Baking in the raw

As a blogger of integrity (or BoI), I feel it's important to record my failures alongside my successes. This is an account of one of those failures. I've recently, and I blame working from home for this, decided to make raw 'baked' goods. It started innocently enough. I like to bake, but am trying to eat less sugar, so I've been getting away from my usual food blogs and looking at ones with healthier baking options. I'm not particularly interested in raw 'baking' or vegan treats, but it seems most of the low-sugar options lead back to these sorts of sites. I found a raw brownie recipe that was composed entirely of ground walnuts, dates, cocoa powder, and dried cherries. They were decent, although crumblier and not holding a candle to the egg, butter, and sugar rich brownies of last post.

After the brownie experiment, I was left with some expensive dates. Since dates seem to be the sweetener of choice for most of the raw baking sites I'd found, I thought I owed it to myself to try something a little more ambitious. Enter: the raw vegan cheesecake. Now I'd made a dairy free cheesecake before for my lactose intolerant sister using that fake tofu-based cream cheese, but as she isn't vegan, I loaded that sucker with eggs. Thus this experiment was a horse of a different color. I chose a simple lemon cheesecake adapted from a number of different recipes. For the crust, I mixed:

• 1 1/2 cups of nuts
• 1/2 dates
  

in the food processor until I had a gooey, crumbly mixture. I used a mixture of walnuts, almonds, and pecans because I tend to have dribs and drabs of all nuts floating around. I suspect any nut would do. I then pressed this mixture into a springform pan.

The crust part of this experiment went along swimmingly.

The filling was composed of:

• 3 cups soaked cashews
• Juice and zest from 2 lemons
• 1/2 honey
• 1/2 coconut oil (melted)
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp vanilla

The filling is where things started to go awry. I think the first issue was that I under-soaked my cashews. Being a non-vegan, and having never soaked nuts before, I took them out when they seemed plenty water logged. I think it had been about 3 hours, but in hindsight it might have been closer to 2. The second issue is that you really need a good food processor for this. I have only a tiny one, so I had to do it in batches. It didn't seem to be working well, so I transferred to a blender, and when that failed, back to the food processor. Despite my many efforts, the concoction never did quite take on the consistency of cheesecake filling. I've had delicious raw cheesecakes before, so I know cashews are capable of amazing things. Mine however, whether from poorly soaked nuts or improper kitchen appliances, tasted good but still maintained a rough texture, not unlike finely ground nuts.

My kitchen post "cheesecake" filling making. Much like my attempts to replicate mall pretzels, I have come to the conclusion that just paying for a piece of cheesecake on those rare occasions that I do go to raw restaurants is probably worth it. $10 no longer seems unrealistic.

After leaving the cake in the fridge for 4 hours to firm up, I tried a piece. Only it didn't look as appetizing as I had hoped, so, in the spirit of true failure, I turned to refined sugar. I'd originally planned to decorate the surface with fresh raspberries because I consider fresh raspberries to be a panacea for all baking ills. However, fresh raspberries are currently not available at any price in the two fruit markets by my house, so I settled on blackberries. But blackberries seemed too tart to just drop on top whole...so I ended up cooking them into a sauce with a couple of tablespoons of sugar and some water. The result:

Not the prettiest dessert I've ever made, and the texture left something to be desired, but the taste was actually pretty good!

I'm not entirely ready to give up on raw "baking." Mostly because I still have half a package of dates and the only other thing I know to do with them is stuff them with almonds and wrap them in bacon (although now that I've written it out...I might just do that...). Hopefully, my next project will be another one for the success column.

The blissful marriage of fat, sugar, and salt

A week or so ago, during one of my senseless dessert blog crawls, I came across this beguiling creation. For those of you who are link shy and don't want to be deprived of Astorian Dream commentary for even a moment, I can summarize it for you: it's the most delicious looking dessert creation and also a really well presented blog. So enraptured am I by what is so far the only post I have seen on it, that I became the 747th follower of the blog (an honor I usually only bestow on people who require you to follow them to enter some contest for a free silicon muffin pan or something or, you know, people I actually know). Let me break it down further for you. This dessert is inspired by the pretzel m&m, a treat that despite my predilection for all things sweet and salty, I have never tried. I chalk that up to the fact I almost never buy candy and because I found the ad campaign somewhat unsettling. I'm all about anthropomorphizing food, but does it have to be so surgical?

At any rate, I digress. Let's revenons à nos moutons. Or rather revenons à nos sugar cravings. To break this down, does this dessert have a layer of chocolate mousse decorated with pretzel m&ms? It does. Does it also have a rich cheesecake layer at its core? Again, yes. Finally, is the creation stabilized by a delicious pretzel-based crust? It couldn't be any other way. For all of the above reasons, I knew I had to make this. However, I am not such a glutton that I would consider making it without an occasion, knowing that I would be forced to consume at least half of it myself. So quickly, I began searching for an occasion. Granted, I could always just invite people over to my apartment, but then they would probably expect food other than just cheesecake. As luck would have it, a good friend had just moved to a new place and another friend a couple of blocks away had just re-decorated her apartment. The two decided to have a dinner party potluck to show off their new digs. Game on.

I'm not going to post the recipe, because honestly I didn't change anything, so you should probably just check out the link above. Actually, the one change I did make was to sub regular m&ms for the pretzel ones. I hope this doesn't defeat the purpose of the whole thing, but they just weren't available at my grocery store, so I guess I still need to try them. All of the other layers were completed to the best of my ability following the original recipe though.

The finished product. It's not a great photo, because at this point in the evening we were more concerned with cutting into it. I suppose blog presentation is perhaps one of the reasons that blogger has almost 750 followers, and I have just under 20 (not that I don't appreciate every last one of you--I remember when I was still in single digits!)

I hardly need to go into taste on this one. It's a cheesecake with a pretzel crust and a chocolate mousse layer, taste was never the concern. Making prudent health choices is really the only limiting factor on this one.

A cupcake a day keeps the cravings at bay

Er, so this whole "being out of town the first 10 days of July" thing means I likely won't make my self-imposed blog post quota for the month. Luckily, I'm pretty sure that only matters to me, because my readers are all forward-thinking, dynamic individuals whose lives do not revolve entirely around my blog. Nevertheless, I'm an online publication junkie and if I don't publish at least a few each month, I'll develop some sort of twitch brought on by the delusional certainty that someone, somewhere might be desperately wanting to know what cupcakes I made this week.

Well, wait no longer, cupcake-loving reader! This week was a co-worker's birthday, so I naturally made some mini cakes. I don't actually know the birthday girl that well, but then when have I let that deter me from an excuse to bake? The only thing I knew about her cake preferences was that she didn't care for chocolate, and preferred fruity sweet things. As luck would have it, I'd just encountered a delicious looking apple cupcake recipe on The Sweetest Kitchen. I skipped out on the dulce de leche filling (not because I don't think it would by transcendently good, but because I got home late and was lazy), but otherwise followed the recipe precisely, so I'm not going to bother posting it here as well.

I made no changes to the composition of the cupcakes, but I did make a couple of cosmetic changes. Yes, the simple pecan on top of cream cheese frosting background is understated and elegant, but office birthday parties require more panache than elegance. I went a different way with it:

They're little apples! Which you can't really see that well because I haven't fully figured out the simple photography concept of "proper lighting." But each is red frosted with a chocolate covered pretzel 'stem' (I figured the chocolate hating b-day girl could overlook this small detail for the greater good), frosting leaves, and a gummy worm half peeking out. Actually in some ways, this picture is an improvement because the hue seems somewhat apple-y. In real life, these were more of a hot pink. I kept adding red food coloring and yet never achieved a rich, red color. After the 20th drop of food coloring, I started to have images of lab rats dying of cancer and settled on cotton candy colored apples.

So there you have it, readers: apple cupcakes. Not quite as healthy or fiber rich as their unadulterated natural counterpart, but I maintain that anything with gummy worms on it is good for one's inner child.