• 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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

So here’s the secret to easy bread making: mix up a big batch of dough and let it rise and ferment slowly. Pull a lump out of the fridge when you want to make a loaf, let it rise a bit more and bake it. No need to knead, nothing complicated.

Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is a series of books based on this method, with endless variations of flavour and style. Erin’s been baking a lot of bread this way lately, and it’s all been delicious. She recommends this post that explains the basic recipe, with photos of the different steps. This European Peasant Bread is particularly good.

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.

All this talk of baking inspired me to pull out the recipe books last night to find something to make. We had a bag of almonds in the pantry from last month’s visit to Kai Tika food co-op, and I wanted something like a cookie. The index of Veganomicon had a few ideas about what to do with almonds, including Almond-Anise Biscotti.

When I started drinking coffee as a teenager, I’d order a biscotti with my mochaccino and feel like I was the height of sophistication. Biscotti was a trend treat in Auckland for a few years: the pre-Sex and the City answer to the cupcake. I haven’t eaten biscotti in a few years, and I remember soon after I decided to be vegan, thinking that biscotti would be impossible to make vegan. For some reason I thought that eggs were the key.

Not so: these were not hard to make at all (though took a while – they’re baked twice and need to cool in between). Ground flaxseeds take the place of eggs as a binding agent, and the flavour combination of anise seeds (The Spice Trader from Sabato) and almond extract (Flavorganics from Harvest Wholefoods) was complex and special. I took most of the batch to work, where three different people declared that it was the best biscotti they’d ever eaten.

You can find the recipe on Google Books, but you really should buy your own copy of Veganomicon if you don’t have it already.

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.

Alice Leonard is well known among Auckland vegans as the owner of Angel Food, a manufacturer and importer of vegan treats including soy condensed milk, vegan caviar and egg-free meringue mix. She also organises media and events for the Vegan Society of Aotearoa NZ, writes vegan recipes for the Ponsonby News and generally makes vegan magic happen in this city.

Alice is also an accomplished vegan baker; the photo above comes from a batch of wedding cupcakes she made. Alice generously brought a virtual plate to my virtual vegan bake sale by answering a few questions:

What’s your favourite vegan thing to bake? Where did the recipe come from?

My two standards are chocolate cake (from Colleen Patrick-Goudreau’s The Joy of Vegan Baking) and banana cake (based on the one in the Edmonds cookbook – it was the first recipe I veganised!).

Have you baked anything interesting lately?

Why yes I have! Today I made a batch of blue Cheezly mini palmiers – I’m planning snacks to go with Christmas drinkies. The recipe will be on my website very soon.

In your experience, what’s the hardest thing about vegan baking? Do you have any horror stories to share?

Replacing eggs is the trickiest bit. It can be done but you need different ingredients depending on the eggs’ function in each particular recipe. I’ve conveniently forgotten all my baking horror stories! Suffice to say, they generally occur when I try to make things too healthy

Do you have any tips for new vegan bakers?

Forget your old favourite recipes for now – get yourself a good vegan baking book and find some new favourites! Once you’re used to vegan baking, that’s the time to veganise your old recipes.

Cupcakes or cookies?

Cupcake to look at, cookie to eat!

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.

Baking tofu counts, right? I just pulled a batch of almond-anise biscotti out of the oven, but wanted to post first about the fancy dinner that Erin and I made this evening: baked coconut-lime tofu, served with ginger-roasted carrots with mellow miso dressing, on wholewheat couscous.

The carrots and miso were based on a recipe from My New Roots blog. The tofu was from the Vegan Yum Yum cookbook, and went a bit like this:

Coconut Lime Tofu

based on a Vegan Yum Yum recipe.

Drain and press 2 small of tofu. For this meal, we used water-packed tofu from Top Grade Tofu on Dominion Road. Top Grade makes several kinds of fresh tofu on-site – all very reasonably-priced and delicious.

Preheat the oven to 200°C, and oil a medium-sized baking dish.

Slice the tofu into 8 even pieces, and place them in the dish.

Blend together the marinade: 2/3 cup of coconut milk, 1/4 cup of tamari (the original recipe calls for soy sauce, but I think this makes it a bit too salty), the zest of 1 lime, the juice of half a lime and 2 teaspoons of sugar. Pour the marinade over the tofu.

Bake for 25 minutes, then flip and bake for 10 minutes, or until most of the liquid marinade is gone.

Serve and eat! Half of this recipe served two of us, so I’d say it serves 2-4 depending on how hungry you are.

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.

My first tip for new vegan bakers: these days, a good place to start learning is not by taking your favourite non-vegan recipes and substituting for the animal ingredients, but by picking out a good, recently-published vegan cookbook that provides well-tested, born-vegan recipes. Substitution is often successful and not necessarily difficult, but you’ll gain confidence by baking something that is delicious on its own merits, and not just by comparison with the non-vegan original it’s trying to be.

The power duo of vegan baking recipe books is Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero of The Post-Punk Kitchen. Their Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World inspired much of Revel’s best work. Erin’s made me some great muffins from Vegan Brunch. I haven’t flicked through Cupcakes‘ sequel, Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, yet, but I trust that it’s just as good. Their much larger vegan food bible, Veganomicon, includes a few great cookie recipes.

We baked one of them recently; the cookies pictured above are the Chewy Oatmeal-Raisin Cookies from the Veganomicon. Their texture, spice and sweetness is all perfect, and the recipe is really simple. It makes a big batch, so we baked a couple of trays, and finished off the rest of the mixture in the most American way possible: straight from the freezer, as frozen cookie dough.

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.