Cat and Cake.

Chocolate avocado cake, banana cake, chocolate avocado cake.

Cinnamon buttercream.

Chocolate ganache&sprinkles.

Ginger and Plum Tofu.

My new favourite thing to do is make lots of tofu for dinner, and save some for lunch the next day. I cheated and bought a marinade- ginger and plum, yum!- sliced the tofu into fairly slim triangles and grilled for around 15 minutes, turning every so often. In a frying pan I melted some butter, then threw in half a bag of spinach, allowing it to wilt gently, whilst seasoning and grating nutmeg over. When the tofu is nearly cooked, I threw a handful of cashews under the grill with it so they are slightly tangy and crunchy, then serve with plenty of salad. Delish!

Home made ravioli and garlic bread.

I took a little break since Vegan MoFo, and haven't been doing too much cooking lately (at least no blog-worthy meals!) but recently I changed jobs and have a few more dinner times free to cook things, which has been nice. Mostly they have been consisting of vegetable in various sauces and spices, so it's been lovely having some goodness back in my diet. Not that I don't think my houmous diet was good- oh it was GOOD- it isn't so good for my immune system, especially as the temperature has dropped in the last couple of weeks!

So me and Mr T made ravioli last weekend; he even bought a super cute pasta machine! I can't quite remember the recipe, and we totally stole the recipes from both Gordan Ramsey and Maple Spice's blog! For the mixture Mr Ramsey gave us a great demonstration (his videos on The F Word are brilliant! Simple, no fuss, I love them!) and consisted of spinachy, buttery nutmegy, melting-in-your-mouth, tossed with toasted pine nuts piles of delish! The ingredients and method for the ravioli can be found at Deb's blog (link below) and were so simple and fun to make! We also used her garlic bread recipe. All in all a buttery garlicy deliciously indulgent dinner, which we followed with a piece of strawberry cheesecake and can be found in the freezers in Holland and Barratt. Go find all these nice things and eat them!

www.channel4.com/food/on-tv/f-word

http://www.maplespice.com/

Vegan MoFo: Chocolate Avocado Cake.

Well I had some avocados getting mushier and mushier by the day, and wondered whether they would make a good egg replacement- kind of like mushy bananas. So I did some good old googling and found a few recipes which raved about avocado goodness with cake. I figured that chocolate cake would probably be the best move, just to be sure that the cake had no hint of avocado! This lovely site gave me the perfect recipe: http://www.joythebaker.com/blog/ they also have some great vegan recipes, and plenty of beautiful veganizable ones too. The photography is so lovely. I have adapted the recipe, adding and omitting things that I didn't have and things that I love to add to chocolate cake recipes.

3 cups plain flour
6 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
2 cups golden caster sugar
1/4 cup vegetable oil

1/2 cup soft avocado, well mashed, about 1 medium avocado
2 cups water
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Handful of ground almonds

Plenty of cinnamon

Preheat oven to 180c. Sift together all of the dry ingredients except the sugar. Set that aside too. Mix all the wet ingredients together in a bowl, including the super mashed avocado.
Add sugar into the wet mix and stir. Mix the wet with the dry all at once, and beat with a whisk (by hand) until smooth. Pour batter into a greased cake tins. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes, until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Let cakes cool in pan for 15 minutes, then turn out onto cooling racks to cool completely before frosting the cake. The recipe I began with used avocado icing- no butter!- but I decided on some vanilla buttercream, with just a smidge to glue the two cakes together. The chocolate cake is really moist and I wanted that to shine through. Ideally I would like to make some cream cheese buttercream frosting! I finished the cake with a dusting of icing sugar.

Vegan MoFo: Best Burritos in Town!

More burrito cravings occured today, and as we were at London Bridge we took a detour and stopped off at Tortilla! We asked if they could make us a vegan burrito, and without hesitation the kind gentleman explained that we could have everything except for the meat, cheese and soured cream. We had a HUGE burrito filled with tomato rice (or a choice of lemon and coriander), two choices of beans, guacamole, salad and salsa verde (or a choice of mild salsa and HOT salsa. Salsa verde is medium heat).

I was a stupid head and didn't bring my camera, but they were delicious and packed full to the brim and super satisfying! You can choose exactly what goes into them, how spicy you would like your salsa, and you can buy bottles of various spicy sauces. Two large burritos, an extra pot of habanera sauce, a bottle of corona and a bottle of water came to 15 pounds.

They also offer fajitas, naked burritos (oh my) and tortilla baskets.

I pretty much looked like this afterwards:

And here's a kitty!!

http://www.tortilla.co.uk/

Vegan MoFo: Tasty Treats!

Without getting ahead of myself, I think my mouth might be getting a little better...!
I've halved the amount of painkillers I'm taking, and had my first coffee in what feels like a month!
Must be all the positive thinking, mushy food and all the lovely comments people have been leaving for me here, and on twitter.

Today I even managed to eat...

Gingerbread Waffles!! Yummm. I used the recipe from Vegan Brunch It's the best <3

I drowned them in maple syrup and chopped up some fresh strawberries (still UK!).
And for a midnight snack while I watched Question Time on iplayer:

Using a pizza cutter I divided up some wraps which had been lolling around in my kitchen cupboards since last weekend, into 8 triangles. I brushed both sides with a light coating of oil and popped them in the oven for a few minutes to crisp up. Let them go a golden brown, and they'll finish crisping as they cool down. I tossed them in a bowl with sea salt, before serving them with some sweet chilli dipping sauce.

I'm still going to stick to my routine of resting and runny-food, but dream that by the weekend I can go to Borough Market and buy a nice loaf of crunchy bread and some olives and maybe even have some wine (!!!)

Vegan MoFo: Mushy Food.

So here are the delights that I've been whipping up today, to sooth my weary mouth:

I used the ingredients for Omelette, in Vegan Brunch, but added some roasted veggies from last nights dinner, and turned it into a kind of omelette scramble. I chopped some tomatoes and had a slice of buttered wholemeal bread with it, and served it on my favourite plate to cheer me up.

You can't see because of the food, but it has lots of drawings of cakes and biscuits and Minnie Mouse on it!

For dessert, some stewed apples with cinnamon, on a bed of porridge and a swirl of maple syrup. Beige food, yes! Hopefully my mouth will thank me for this brown bonanza, as I'm off to work soon!