Vegan Baking

The Urban Vegan beat me to it but as promised here's a post about Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's excellent new book, The Joy of Vegan Baking. It's a book filled with recipes for "sinful sweets", but as you've seen, the first recipe we tried was the Mediterranean Olive Bread. Anything filled with olives and sun-dried tomatoes is just fine by me and this bread was no exception. Next we went to the sweet side for the Gingerbread Cookies, which turned out delicious with just the right amount of spice. And though we had to adjust the amount of sugar in the icing recipe to get the right consistency, it ultimately turned out perfect and set very well. As if iced gingerbread cookies aren't fun enough, we broke out the squirrel with nut and kitty cat cookie cutters for these to up the fun factor a little more.

Since it's apple season, another recipe that caught our eyes was the German Apple Cake. What's not to love about fresh apples doused with cinnamon sugar baked on top of a moist fluffy cake?


And just yesterday I made the Lemon Bars - a tangy and sweet filling over a shortbread crust. Both this recipe and the apple cake I had to bake longer than the time listed in the recipe, but in the end both came out great.

What a smoothie recipe is doing in a baking book I'm not sure, but we did make the Berry Smoothie recipe as well. I don't usually need a recipe to make a smoothie but I did appreciate the addition of almond butter in this recipe, which adds another interesting layer of flavor. Likewise, pancake recipes abound, but for breakfast yesterday morning I gave the pancake recipe in this book a try and they were simple, fluffy and delicious.

We already have several other recipes bookmarked so I'm sure you'll be seeing more from The Joy of Vegan Baking here in the future. I do think there may be a little too much reliance in this book on commercial egg-replacer powder and perhaps also on vegan margarine, but personally I don't really have a problem with that and it certainly won't stop me from recommending that you go buy yourself a copy right now. With such a dazzling array of recipes you're sure to find a lot to like.