Another MoFo month

So that’s Vegan MoFo for another year! Like last year, I aimed to write as much as I could about vegan food and post at least every day. This year, I wrote 42 posts! They were about:

• The brunches of Auckland. Options at Cosset, the vegan stack at Vinyl, porridge at Domain and Ayr and my standyby order at cafés that don’t have a vegan option: the bagel with avocado. I also made a Facebook gallery of vegan brunch options in Auckland, so you can visually pick out something that looks good. Please let me know if you’re aware of any local vegan brunch options I haven’t reviewed yet – the only ones I know of are at Verona and the Heritage Auckland.
• And the other meals. A couple of good lunches I ate: a soba noodle tofu wrap from The Little Grocer, and a fava bean salad from Sheinkin. A good dinner: little plates at C.A.C.
• Sorbet. Mostly, but not exclusively, the ever-evolving selection from Giapo. His new vegan chocolate cones and coffee sorbet and coconut lime sorbet were all lovely. Also good: blackcurrant sorbet from Kohu Road. And an honourable mention, though I didn’t write more than 140 characters about it: lemon mint from Giapo. Like a mojito without the booze.
• Cupcakes. The top five places to get vegan cupcakes in Auckland (readers have since suggested a few more, so this post may need revisiting in the near future), a lovely ginger cupcake from Revel, and a batch I baked myself: Hazelnut with Mocha Hazelnut Mousse Filling. Also a couple of non-cup cakes, both from Cosset: blueberry cake with soy cream, and orange, cranberry and pistachio cake.
• Places to shop for vegan treats and ingredients: Paris Berlin organic bakery for bread and pretzels, the Gluten free Grocer for cookies and other delicious things that are gluten free, Top Grade Tofu for the best tofu in town (which you should use to make coconut lime baked tofu), and Sabato for fancy imported and local foodstuffs.
• And new products to try: Cheesey sauce from Angel Food, vegan Tim Tams, Fair Trade dried bananas,  Turkish chemen spread, the spiciest chocolate in town, Pete’s Natural Lemonade and some rather good frozen Korean dumplings.
• Events around town. A vegan short film premiere, vegetarian snacks at Diwali festival, International Day of the Nacho and Blind Week. I ran a virtual bake sale for Blind Week, where I posted about vegan baking for a week and asked people to donate to the RNZFB (you can still donate until tomorrow, 5 November). Posts included a mini-interview with Alice Leonard from Angel Food, cookies from The Post-Punk Kitchen recipe books, Almond-Anise Biscotti and the secret to five minute bread. I wrote a round-up post after the bake sale with more detail.
• Travel. As much as I like vegan food in Auckland, other cities have also fed me well. Among the places I’ve eaten in recent times are Wellington and Thailand: Phuket , Chiang Mai and Bangkok.
• & Vegan MoFo itself. I wrote about MoFo, and looked at the other three participants from New Zealand.

More statistics if you’re interested: I passed 200 posts on the blog this month (this will be post #213), and welcomed my 500th follower on Twitter! I had way more visitors in October than in any previous month of publishing – more than three times as many as last MoFo. The day I posted about orange cake from Cosset was this blog’s busiest day ever. The most visited post this month was about Cosset too – specifically its brunch options.

This month: I’ll be posting a bit less, as I don’t have as much to catch up on (things I want to tell you about: the Heritage Auckland; maybe more of my travels – Melbourne, NYC, LA and San Francisco; dinner at Ras Vatika the other night; a few more products I’ve found around the place). I’m looking forward to the NZ Food Bloggers’ Conference next weekend, and to my favourite Scorpio’s birthday. As always, feel free to suggest things I should write about, or ask questions if there’s anything you’re looking for. Thanks for reading!

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Vegan MoFo

November 4, 2011

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Packing up from the bake sale

Today’s the last day of Blind Week, so this concludes the virtual bake sale series of posts. You can still donate online to support the work of the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind until 5 November. I already mentioned that I work for the RNZFB, but I’m supporting Blind Week here, too, because I feel strongly about the cause. If I lost my sight tomorrow, I know I could count on the RNZFB to help me learn to read ingredients labels on food products, re-learn how to use a computer and keep blogging, and develop skills to keep baking my own cupcakes and finding my way to the liquor store up the street when I ran out of Frangelico. I know that the RNZFB makes this kind of difference to people’s lives every day, but so much depends on public fundraising. If you can spare a few dollars, please think about donating.

If you haven’t been following the bake sale this week, here’s what you missed:

• An introduction to the virtual vegan bake sale.
• Post-punk cookies – vegan baking recipe books & a recipe for Chewy Oatmeal-Raisin Cookies.
• Savoury baking – coconut lime baked tofu from Vegan Yum Yum.
• A mini interview with Alice from Angel Food.
• Almond-Anise Biscotti from Veganomicon, maybe the best biscotti ever.
• Five minute bread – a great thing that happens in our kitchen pretty regularly.
• Top five places to get vegan cupcakes in Auckland – let me know if you have other recommendations.
• Fancy cupcakes: Hazelnut with Mocha Hazelnut Mousse Filling – I baked these last night, and they’re amazing.

 

This post is part of my virtual vegan bake sale for Blind Week. Please give generously to make the world a better place for blind and partially sighted New Zealanders.

whatev

Blind Week, Vegan MoFo

October 31, 2011

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A vegan film premiere

I saw the trailer for Tegan the Vegan a little while ago. A short claymation telling the story of a schoolgirl vegan and her rival Elenore the Carnivore, it was released in January 2011 and has been playing the Australian film festival circuit. Wikipedia says the story is partly based on an autobiographical story of the director, 29 year old Marisa Martin, who became a vegetarian when she was 12 after visiting an abattoir.

Today, Erin picked up a programme for the Show Me Shorts festival, and noticed that Tegan the Vegan is headlining a food-related selection called Master Chef! The festival is playing at four locations in Auckland, and Tegan the Vegan will be playing at each of them this week and/or next: the Capitol in Balmoral, The Bridgeway in Northcote, The Internationalist Bistro & Wine Bar in Rothesay Bay, and the Waiheke Island Community Cinema. Check out the Show Me Shorts website for full details of session times.

events

Balmoral, film, Northcote, Rothesay Bay, Tegan the Vegan, Vegan MoFo, Waiheke

October 31, 2011

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Fancy cupcakes: Hazelnut with Mocha Hazelnut Mousse Filling

My Blind Week cupcake poll was a tie (thanks again, Jaco & Lhizz!) so I chose the recipe I was most excited about: Hazelnut Cupcakes with Mocha Hazelnut Mousse Filling. I’d tried these once before at Revel, and loved them, but the recipe always sounded too complicated to make at home.

As it turned out, none of the three recipes that come together to make these cupcakes are complicated, but they are rather expensive. If you don’t already have the ingredients on hand, your first batch of these cupcakes could set you back somewhere between $50 and $100. I had to buy a few things to round out the ingredient lists, but now that my pantry’s stocked with Frangelico and hazelnut flour, I could make several more batches of these without spending too much.

Here’s how they come together:

 

1. Mocha Hazelnut Mousse

• 175g extra-firm silken tofu (e.g. Mori-Nu – I found a sausage-shaped tube of silken tofu at Bok Mart in Eden Terrace)
• 2 Tbsp plain soy milk
• 1 Tbsp pure maple syrup (or agave nectar)
• 4 tsp instant espresso powder (I used a bit less of real ground coffee beans – Supreme beans – but the result was a bit grittier than would have been ideal)
• 2 tsp hazelnut liqueur (I used Frangelico)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract (Erin made this from some vanilla pods we found at La Cigale French Market)
• 175g semisweet chocolate, chopped (I used Whittaker’s Dark Cacao)

Crumble the tofu into a blender (or a small bowl if you have an immersion blender). Add everything else except for the chocolate, and blend until completely smooth.

Melt the chocolate in a double boiler, mixing with a rubber spatula as it melts. Once it’s melted, take it off the heat and let it cool for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the chocolate to the tofu and blend until combined. Cover in glad wrap and put it in the fridge to chill for an hour. Take the mixture out of the fridge 10 minutes before you are ready to use it.

 

2. The cupcakes

• 2⁄3 cup rice milk or nut milk
• 1 Tbsp ground flaxseeds
• 1 cup + 2 Tbsp all-purpose flour
• 1⁄3 cup hazelnut meal or hazelnut flour (I used Bob’s Red Mill hazelnut flour, which is newly stocked at the Gluten free Grocer. There was recently a lot of online controversy about the company’s founding, but former owner (Bob) deciding to make a personal donation of $25 million to a university that is known for animal testing. Mylene wrote a thoughtful piece about why this might not be a productive target for a vegan boycott.)
• 1 tsp baking powder
• ¼ tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp ground cinnamon
• ¼ tsp ground nutmeg
• ½ tsp salt
• 1⁄3 cup canola oil
• ¼ cup maple syrup
• ½ cup brown sugar, packed
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 Tbsp hazelnut liqueur (e.g. Frangelico), or 1½ tsp hazelnut extract (you can find this at Harvest Wholefoods/ Huckleberry Farms)

Lay out 12 cupcake cases in a cupcake pan, and preheat the oven to 180 degrees C.

In a small bowl, mix together the rice milk and ground flaxseed. Add the maple syrup, sugar, canola oil, vanilla, and hazelnut liqueur. Beat well.

In a large bowl, sift together the flour, hazelnut flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt.

Add the wet ingredient mixture to the dry, mixing until mostly smooth. Pour the mixture into cupcake liners, two-thirds filling them.

Bake for 22 to 24 minutes – check they’re done by inserting a toothpick into the middle of one and checking it comes out clean. Transfer onto racks to cool completely before filling.

 

3. Chocolate ganache and toasted hazelnuts

• ¼ cup soy milk
• 115g semisweet chocolate, chopped
• 2 Tbsp pure maple syrup

Heat the soy milk to a gentle boil in a small saucepan. Immediately remove from the element and add the chocolate and maple syrup. Mix with a rubber spatula until the chocolate is fully melted and smooth. Set aside at room temperature till ready to use.

Toast 1 cup of hazelnuts, and chop them roughly.

 

4. Assemble

If you have a pastry bag, choose a wide tip for piping. If you don’t have a proper pastry bag, do what I did and snip the corner off a strong zip-loc bag. Fill the bag with the mousse filling.

Poke a hole in the top of each cupcake with your finger. Fill each cupcake with as much mousse as you can, and wipe off any excess with your finger or a knife.

Spread the chocolate ganache onto the cupcakes, and sprinkle with hazelnuts.

Put the cupcakes in the fridge to set the ganache. (This is where mine are right now – I haven’t eaten one yet, but the crumbs & scraps I sampled were all delicious).

 

This post is part of my virtual vegan bake sale for Blind Week. Please give generously to make the world a better place for blind and partially sighted New Zealanders.

recipes

Blind Week, cupcakes, Gluten Free Grocer, Vegan MoFo

October 31, 2011

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Top five places to get vegan cupcakes in Auckland

1. Revel on K Road, where you’ve been able to buy vegan cupcakes for a few years now. The offerings are ever-changing (though often come from one particular cookbook: Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World) and they’re so consistently good that Revel’s cupcakes earned their own category on this blog. While I’m not eating them as often as I once did, I still appreciate Revel’s selection.

 

2. Cosset in Mt Albert is a bit out of the way, but worth the trip. They always have a range of baked sweet treats, usually including cupcakes. All of Cosset’s food is vegan, and they offer soy cream as an optional side with your cake order. They often have gluten-free options, as well.

 

3. Kraftbomb is a monthly craft market in Grey Lynn. City, the NZ Cupcake Queen, is one of the market’s organisers. She’s vegan and a keen cupcake baker. Tomorrow’s Halloween special Kraftbomb will be worth a visit – last year’s cupcakes included severed fingers and chocolate pumpkins.

 

4. The Little Grocer usually has baked vegan things, and often has these little carrot cakes with cranberries on top. Keep an eye on their Facebook page for announcements, as they sometimes post what’s on offer.

 

5. Your kitchen? You know, I wanted to write a top 5 post, but I couldn’t think of a fifth place that sells vegan cupcakes regularly. I found the local Miss Melicious cupcake delivery service online recently, but haven’t heard any reports about the quality of her offerings (but the flavours all look good).

I’m going to bake cupcakes tomorrow. I put the choice of recipe up for a vote as part of my virtual vegan bake sale: if you donate any amount to Blind Week through my online collection, you get to vote. I’m choosing between three recipes from the “fancy cupcakes” section of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World: Hazelnut Cupcakes with Mocha Hazelnut Mousse Filling, Coconut Lime Cupcakes and Cashew Butter Cardamom Cupcakes with Rich Cashew Butter Frosting. If you want to help me decide, please donate and vote by tomorrow morning.

 

This post is part of my virtual vegan bake sale for Blind Week. Please give generously to make the world a better place for blind and partially sighted New Zealanders.

cupcakes from revel, places to eat

Blind Week, Cosset, cupcakes, Kraftbomb, Revel, The Little Grocer, Vegan MoFo

October 29, 2011

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