Vegan Apple & Blackberry Pie

A couple of lovely new friends invited us over to brunch the other weekend and so we decided to make a fruit pie to take along with us.

That morning at the Farmers Markets we picked up a punnet of lovely fresh blackberries and so we thought that it would be fun to bake a blackberry pie. We also had a few apples in the fridge and so we threw them in (along with a pear that we thought would add a nice sweetness to the mix).

The result was delicious. The apricot pie might still be my favourite, but really I'd put them neck and neck. The apples and pear were all warm and cinnamon-y, while the blackberries just exploded in your mouth with their tart sweetness. mmmm




Ingredients:
One punnet of blackberries
3 small apples (peeled, cored and chopped)
1 pear (cored and chopped)
1 teaspoon cinnamon
2 tablespoons of brown sugar
1/4 cup of almond meal (or LSA)

Pastry:
2 cups whole-wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup canola oil
1/2 cup cold water

Essentially just make the pastry and roll it flat. Then line a pie dish and dry bake it for about 10 minutes on 200-220 C.

Then mix the apple and pear with the dry ingredients and place them in the baked pastry. Cover with blackberries and then make a lid with the remaining pastry - or chop it up into strips in order to make a thatched lid.

Bake for another 35-40 minutes on 200-220C (or until golden brown on top).

Here's a picture of the inside before we baked it:

Food photos - recipes to follow

I've been terribly slack on the food blogging front (well on the blogging front in general) and so I thought that I would share a few photos of what we have been cooking (and eating) and that this might prompt me to get some recipes up to go with the images.

Beans on toast (with parsley, tomatoes and spices)

Lentil and rocket salad (with a tahini and lemon juice dressing)

Grilled veggies (mushrooms, zucchini and eggplant)

Rosemary roast veggies (pumpkin and sweet potato)

Polenta encrusted tofu (with mushrooms, asparagus and fried polenta)

Choc-chip cookies

Coconut sticky rice

Vegan Apricot Pie

Now that Summer is upon us, I am trying to focus even more on eating seasonally. And so, starting with the A's, we took advantage of the gorgeous apricots that are now well and truly in season (P picked up a 1kg bag of them for $3 at the farmers markets) and made a scrumptious apricot pie for desert last night.



INGREDIENTS

Pastry
1 & 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour
1/2 cup almond meal
2 tablespoons of brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup non-hydrogenated margarine (or non-GM canola oil)
1/2 cup cold water

Filling
500g fresh apricot halves
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup almond meal
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
3 teaspoons fresh lemon juice


Preheat oven to 210C.

Start with the pastry. Sift the flour, almond meal, brown sugar and salt together. Knead the margarine into the dry ingredients until it is like bread crumbs. Add the cold water slowly and mix together. Hold back on some of the cold water to ensure that the mixture doesn't get too damp. Roll into two balls of equal size. Then flatten them and roll them into flat circles.

Place one pastry circle into a pie pan or an round oven-proof dish. Press in the corners and the edges so that it is evenly distributed across the base and the sides of the dish. Poke a few holes in the base of the pastry with a fork and place in the pre-heated oven for around 10 minutes or until slightly browned.

Now mix together the sugar, flour, almond meal, cinnamon, and nutmeg in a small bowl.

Place apricots in a separate large bowl and stir in the lemon juice. Add the dry mixture to the apricots and stir thoroughly so that the apricots are all coated.



Pour the apricot mixture into the partially-baked pastry. Place the unbaked pastry circle on top to form a lid, carefully squeezing down the edges to create a seal. Cut some vents into the top in order to let out the heat during baking.

Bake for 35 to 40 minutes until golden brown.

Leave to cool for at least 5 minutes before cutting or it will collapse on itself and be too hot to eat!

Fresh tomato & basil soup

We bought a big bag of fresh tomatoes and a bunch of basil at the Farmers Market last weekend because I was going to make Bruschetta for the party. I ran out of time, however, and so I was left with having to think of something else to do with the food. And so we ended up with fresh tomato and basil soup.

I had forgotten just how delicious fresh tomato soup could be and so I thought that I would share the recipe with you. It is extremely simple.




Ingredients
1 kg fresh tomato, peeled and roughly chopped
a handful of fresh basil leaves, roughly chopped
1 tblsp olive oil
3 cups of boiling water
salt & pepper to taste
(a couple of cloves of garlic would be yummy too, if you can eat it).

Slice a cross in the base of the tomatoes and blanch them in boiling water to make it easier to peel them.

Heat the olive oil in a heavy-based stock pot over a medium heat. Add the tomatoes (or the diced garlic first if you are using it) and stir for a couple of minutes. Add the salt (I used about 1/2 teaspoon) and the basil and stir for a minute. Add the boiling water, stir and cover. Leave to simmer over a low heat for around 10-15 minutes.

Serve with crusty toast covered in pesto. (A dollop of pesto in the soup would also be tasty).

Eat outside, if possible.

Vegan Brownie Cupcakes

It was my friend Elissa's 30th birthday last week, and so I decided to bake her cupcakes. I poured over my new book for days beforehand and felt so confused about which recipe to try out first, but in the end I decided to go for "Vegan Brownie Cupcakes" - which I made with organic fair trade chocolate, cocoa and sugar and organic flour.



I must say: they were a success - dense, chocolatey and rich, mmm...

Apple-raspberry tart lunch box

Today's lunch box contains two soy sausage, tahini, pesto, tomato, carrot, shallot & spinach sandwiches, a container of 'cheezy chickpeas', a container of red grapes, raisins & dried apricots and a slice of apple-raspberry & coconut tart (recipe below).


The tart was an idea that came to me early yesterday morning as I lay there wondering whether to get up at 5am or hope for a little more sleep. I remembered that we had some apples that needed using and thought that they would be yummy with a bit of cinnamon, coconut, almond meal & raspberries. Turns out that I was right. P. and I gobbled up a quarter of it last night and only stopped in order to avoid making ourselves sick.

Apple-raspberry and coconut tart

Ingredients

Pastry
2/3 cup plain flour
2/3 cup almond meal
1.5 tablespoons of vegetable oil
2 teaspoons of sugar (optional)
water

Filling
3 Granny Smith apples (peeled, cored and sliced)
2/3 cup raspberries
1/3 cup shredded coconut
1/4 cup plain flour
1/3 cup almond meal
1/4 cup of vegetable oil
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon of ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon of allspice
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
Egg replacer equivalent of 3 eggs


Instructions

Pastry
Preheat the oven to 180 C.

Combine the ingredients together and knead into a ball. Roll flat with a rolling pin (sprinkle some extra flour on top if it feels too sticky) and then press evenly into a greased shallow pie dish (or a pyrex one - they don't stick, which is nice).

Bake for around 8 minutes or until slightly brown (start preparing the filling while the pastry is baking).

Remove from the oven, but leave the oven on.

Filling
Sprinkle one of the teaspoons of cinnamon over the slices of apple and stir through. Place half of the apple slices on the base of the tart in a spiral pattern.

Combine the remaining dry ingredients together in a bowl and stir thoroughly. Add the vegetable oil, egg replacer and stir together. Add water if the mixture is too dry. When well combined, add the raspberries and stir through gently.

Pour the mixture over the apple and spread it out so that it covers the tart evenly.

Place the remaining half of the apple slices on top of the mixture in a spiral pattern, pushing gently so that they sit into the filling. Sprinkle with a small amount of sugar if desired.

Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until the apples are browning and the filling is starting to become crumbly (it will be more sticky than a cake though and so your knife will not come out clean if you stick it in the centre of the tart).

Orange & almond cake with chocolate ganache

When we got married, Paul and I wanted to make sure that everyone who attended our wedding was well catered for at the reception. The food itself was vegan yum cha (at Bodhi in the Park) and we spent some time chatting with the events coordinator to make sure that many of the dishes were gluten-free (including the dipping sauces etc) because several of our guests suffered from coeliac disease. However, Bodhi didn't do cakes, so we had to organise this separately and were delighted to find the perfect solution at O Organics just down the road from our place (at the time) in Surry Hills - an organic, vegan, gluten-free Orange & Almond Cake covered in dark chocolate. The bonus was that it was absolutely delicious - the yummiest cake that I have ever tasted.

Anyway, ever since then (two years ago tomorrow as a matter of fact) I have contemplated purchasing another cake from them, but have always held back feeling that I really ought just make one myself. The problem has always been that I didn't have a recipe and couldn't find one anywhere on the internet or in my recipe books. However, after finding a recipe for a vegan orange cake recently (that didn't work out particularly well), I started thinking that I could probably experiment and make one up that would do just fine. So, when my brother was in town for his 30th birthday last week I decided that I would take the plunge.

I am very happy to report that it was a total and complete success. I was very lucky - the cake turned out to be absolutely perfect (well, perfect for my taste at least).

So, now that I have got it just right, I thought that I would share it with you.

Orange & Almond Cake

1 1/4 cups plain flour (sifted)*
1 1/4 cups almond meal
2 teaspoons baking powder**
3/4 cup light soft brown sugar
1/2 cup soy milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
Juice of 1 orange
Zest of 1 orange

1. Preheat the oven to 180C
2. Combine the flour and almond meal in a large bowl.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together the sugar, soy milk, oil, orange juice and zest.
4. Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and mix well.
5. Pour the mixture into a cake tin (I use the flexi ones because nothing ever sticks to them, but you can just use a normal tin and grease it well).
6. Bake for about 25-30 minutes (in a new fan-forced oven - longer if not), or until the cake browns very slightly on top and a knife comes out clean with poked into the middle of it.
7. Leave the cake in the the tin for around 10 minutes, then turn it out onto a cooling rack and allow to cool for an hour or so.

*If you would prefer to make this recipe gluten-free then slmply replace the flour with almond meal or a gluten-free flour (like rice flour).
**This is quite a dense low-rise cake. If you want it to be a little fluffy then you could add another teaspoon of baking powder.

Dark Chocolate Ganache

1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 1/2 tablespoons soy milk
100grams dark chocolate (preferably fair trade & organic), chopped up into small pieces

1. Heat the oil and soy milk in a double burner (or just a metal bowl placed over a pot of slightly boiling water on the stove).
2. Once they are warm (but not too hot, you don't want the soy milk to boil), add the chocolate and stir until melted.
3. Remove from heat and let it cool (stirring the mixture every now and then).

Once the ganache is mostly cool, then you can pour it over the cake and smooth it around so that it covers it all over.


Leave the cake for a little while to set and then eat it (or serve it to others if you are feeling generous).

Apple-cinnamon muffins

Ingredients
3 granny smith apples, peeled & cored
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1/2 cup vegan margarine (preferably non-hydrogenated)
1 cup plain organic flour
1/2 teaspoon baking power
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup almond meal
egg replacer equivalent of 4 eggs
1/4 cup of water or soy milk

Instructions
Preheat oven to 180 Celsius.

Sift the flour, almond meal, baking powder and egg replacer into a bowl.

Cream the margarine with the sugar and add to the dry mixture. Add the soy milk (or water).

Chop up two of the apples into cubes of around 2cms square. Grate the other one. Place in a large bowl and add the spices. Stir the apple pieces so that they are completely coated in the spices for a little. Add to the rest of the ingredients.

Spoon the mixture into a muffin tray and place in oven for around 10-15 minutes, or until cooked (i.e. slightly brown on top and springs back when you touch it).

Makes around 12 muffins.

Christmas gingerbread

Ingredients
4 cups of plain flour
1 & 1/3 teaspoons of baking soda
1/2 teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoons of ground ginger
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
½ teaspoon of allspice
½ teaspoon of cloves
1/3 cup of vegan margarine
2/3 cup of brown sugar
2/3 cup of molasses
1/2 cup of water


Sift the flour, baking soda, salt, ginger, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves together. In a separate bowl, cream the brown sugar, molasses, and 1/4 cup of water into the margarine.
Combine the wet and dry ingredients and add enough of the remaining water so that it all forms a dough that holds together without being sticky. Break the dough in half and roll into two balls. Place each ball inside a plastic bag and put them in the fridge for an hour or so.

Preheat the oven to 180º C. Grease a few baking sheets with margarine and cover with a thin layer of flour.

Cover (part of) your kitchen bench with flour and roll out the dough, one ball at a time, on to the surface. (A rolling pin makes this easier, but you can also just use a glass jar.) The dough should be fairly even and a little under 1-cm thick. (If it crumbles in place, rub a small amount of margarine into the crumbly area to help smooth it together).

Use 'cookie cutters' to cut the dough into your preferred shapes and peal away the excess dough from around the edges. Use a butter knife to help remove the cut dough from the bench to avoid breaking your baby cookies.

Place cut dough on baking sheets (leaving around 3-cms between them so they don't stick together) and put into over for around 6-10 minutes (depending on how hot your oven is - mine only take 6 minutes). Check them regularly because they can burn easily.

Remove the gingerbread from the oven when it is firm to touch and place on a cooling rack to cool down.

Once cool, decorate your gingerbread with icing, sultanas, lollies, or leave them plain because they are yummy just as they are.
I hope that everyone had a lovely day on the 25th!

Vegan Chocolate Pie

This was such a simple recipe that I didn't really have very high expectations, but I must say this pie was simply delicious!


Ingredients
1/4 cup spelt flour
1/4 cup rice flour
1/2 cup almond meal
1 tablespoon of vegetable oil
water
500g silken tofu
150g dark chocolate (preferably organic and fair trade)


Mix flour, almond meal and oil together and add water until you get the right consistency - it should stick together without being sticky. Press the pastry evenly into a pie dish or a shallow cake tin with the pastry and bake in oven for around 8 minutes on 180 celcius. (I placed some chickpeas on the base for the last few minutes to stop it from rising up too much)

Melt the chocolate and then combine with tofu in a blender. Blend the mixture together and pour onto baked pie crust. Place in fridge for at least two hours while it hardens.

Serve with strawberries or other yummy fruit.