The David Lebovitz effect

I'm very suggestible. Reading this post on David Lebovitz' blog, along with the fact that I had some chickpea liquid in the fridge to use up, led directly to a completely unnecessary, yet somehow very necessary S'mores Pie.

It got a bit burnt under the grill, but I'm pretending that was intentional.

The crust is the Press-in Almond Crust from Vegan Pie in the Sky with some dark cocoa powder added. I baked it at 350 F for 10 minutes.

The chocolate pudding is this one, halved and veganised. (I added a tiny bit of liquid smoke but it was pretty subtle.)

The marshmallow topping went like this:

75 g chickpea liquid
75 g sugar
pinch of cream of tartar
0.5 g xanthan gum
vanilla
--whipped together

Then things get a little bit hazy...
I heated up agar (0.7 g?) with water (not a lot) and sugar (some). It got to at least 108 C (I was originally planning on letting it get to 118, but it was starting to look right so I pulled it early.) I poured this mix down the side of the mixer bowl as it mixed the meringue on high speed. (This is based on my recipe for marshmallows, but with more liquid [here the chickpea liquid is straight out of the can, not reduced]. It ends up marshmallowy but softly set.)

Spread the marshmallow topping on top of the pudding. Put it under the grill and watch it carefully. Put it in the fridge to set up.

Birthday cake

Not the prettiest, but the tastiest:

I made pistachio dacquoise, using my recipe but with chickpea liquid instead of versawhip. I didn't bother with heating the agar mix, I just mixed everything together and assumed that the agar would activate during the baking. (To be honest, I'm actually not even sure whether the agar and xanthan are necessary.)

The filling was a salted caramel mousse, based on a peanut butter mousse from The Voluptuous Vegan. Each dacquoise disk had one side painted with melted chocolate with some roughly ground coriander seeds and some dehydrated ground whole lemon mixed in. I thought I would make some beautiful swirls of chocolate on top but... well, you can see how well that worked. (I didn't count on the chocolate solidifying immediately on the cold mousse!)

I was aiming for the dacquoise to soften slightly, but hoped the chocolate would prevent that from happening too fast. After sitting for about 4 hours, the disks were still quite crisp. 24 hours later, they were quite soggy. Somewhere in between they would've been perfect. The flavour, though, was amazing. I got the idea for the flavour combination from this recipe for Pistachio Millionaire's Shortbread.

Lemon ice box pie

Well, actually, since this was just a test run, I skipped the biscuit-crumb base, so technically this is just lemon ice box pie filling, veganised. I wish I'd made a whole pie: this was fantastic!

I read about this pie in the Tipsy Baker's review of John Besh's book My Family Table (searchable on Google Books). You fold a lemon/sweetened condensed milk mixture through whipped egg whites and freeze, for something that is almost better than a perfect bite of lemon meringue pie. (I say almost because the one thing you are missing is that touch of caramelised meringue. Still, this is really delicious and perfect in its own way: a fluffy sweet lemon mousse-meringue.)

Here's what I did:

14 oz (1 3/4 cups) sweetened condensed soymilk*
1/2 cup lemon juice
3 t lemon zest
1/4 t salt
144 g chickpea liquid
pinch of cream of tartar
2 T sugar
0.8 g xanthan gum
60 ml water
0.8 g agar powder

Mix together the sweetened condensed soymilk, lemon juice, lemon zest and salt.
In a stand mixer, whip the chickpea liquid, cream of tartar, sugar and xanthan gum until you have a nice firm meringue.
Put 60 ml of the condensed soymilk mixture in a small saucepan with the water. Whisk in the agar, and bring to the boil. Simmer a couple of minutes to activate the agar, and then with the stand mixer going on high, pour the agar mixture down the side of the bowl and whip until it is well incorporated.
Fold the meringue into the condensed soymilk mixture, and freeze for at least three hours.

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* Sweetened condensed soymilk =  3 parts by volume Better than Milk original soymilk powder, 2 parts sugar, 1 part boiling water, and 3 T vegan butter per cup of soymilk powder, processed in a blender until smooth. (It makes just slightly more than the volume of milk powder you use: so if you need 1 cup of condensed soymilk, use 1 cup of powder, and you will end up with a little bit leftover.)

Sorghum injera

When we first arrived here, I was dismayed that there didn't seem to be any teff available in Australia. But things changed a year or two later: now you can buy it, though it's kind of expensive. Recently, my cheapskate tendencies have led to me making injera from sorghum flour (teff =$22/kg, sorghum = $4/kg). Apparently this is a traditional injera variant -- I found the recipe (thanks to Google books) in a book called Pseudocereals and Less Common Cereals.

Here's the slightly adapted recipe:

200g sorghum flour (I used red)
150ml water
teaspoon of sourdough starter

Mix together, cover and leave to ferment for 2 days. The original recipe called for less water (only 100 ml). This ferments well at cool room temperature.

After 2 days, take 80g of the ferment and mix with 30ml water, and then stir into 200ml boiling water. Cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Remove from the heat, and cool to about 45C. Mix into the original fermented dough, and then add 100ml water. Leave to rise for a couple of hours, then cook.

They're not quite as stretchy as teff injera, but they are really tangy and bubbly. To be honest, the recipe seemed pretty weird to me -- I wasn't sure that my sourdough starter would like such a long fermentation -- but it worked surprisingly well. As well as being cheaper, it works more reliably for me than making injera with teff. I recall a few times when making teff injera where the process didn't go smoothly, or getting the timing right for the fermentation was a bit tricky.

Durango

Almost Durango cookies (veganized with a bit of cornstarch and water, and dark instead of milk chocolate):

I used alder smoked salt, and though I thought I was sprinkling it on a bit too generously, in the end I couldn't really taste any smoke at all. Nevertheless, these are excellent chocolate chip cookies with almond and cocoa nibs, and salt, and they are flat with crisp edges and chewy middles. A bit more smokiness would be delicious I'm sure. I read about these on the Tipsy Baker, and I think she might've suggested using smoked almonds which is an excellent idea.

Cilantro?

Yesterday, I happened to read this post on the Food 52 blog. This blogger's cilantro chocolate chip cookies made it onto their 'what's in' list. It was like a compulsion or a dare, I couldn't not try them. I followed her recipe for basil verbena cookies, replacing those herbs with cilantro. (It was easily veganized: I just left out the egg and added a little water and cornstarch).

I couldn't let the cookie dough rest as long as it should have: it rested for about 3 hours in the fridge. And the verdict? Delicious. The cilantro added a mild but zippy mintiness. Overall, though, I think I might prefer actual mint. I might try basil next time, as in the original recipe.

Croissants

These are sourdough croissants made with homemade vegan butter. They worked out pretty well (though they're nowhere near as impressive as their inspiration, txfarmer's gorgeous ones). They're much better than the last time I attempted vegan croissants.

The annoying thing about the recipe is that it asks for a 3 hour final rise at 26C. I couldn't see how to make that happen and still have them ready for breakfast, so I left them at cold room temperature (15 - 17C) for about 12 hours, and then put them near the oven as it preheated. They definitely rose a lot in that time, but they weren't (as the recipe puts it) 'soft and jiggly', so maybe they were slightly underproofed. 

The vegan butter behaved nicely for the encasement step, but I was a bit worried about the first turn after it had a rest in the fridge for an hour. I think the butter was too firm: it seemed to crumble as it folded. The final dough looked like pie dough, with specks of butter, which didn't seem quite right. I wonder if it would be better to let the dough rest at room temperature for 20 minutes between turns, as in Peter Reinhart's recipe.

Cauliflower inarizushi

Dinner: 'inarizushi' filled with cauliflower rice, plus dolmades, over salad greens.

The cauliflower rice was half a cauliflower, pulsed in the food processor, plus one carrot, likewise, plus sesame seeds, salt and liquid from the can of inari wrappers. The dolmades were from a can, and were a sort of jokey last minute addition to fill out this meal.

I read that there are various options with inarizushi: you can use plain rice, sushi rice or sweet rice (okay, cauliflower) like I did here. I think I might prefer sushi seasoning over the sweet version.

Also, it should be noted that Inari herself, as the goddess of rice, would be very unhappy with these cauliflower imposters. I'm not sure how foxes would feel about them.