Pi Day!
Happy Pi Day! Those crazy mathematicians may claim they need pi to do complicated things to circles, but I know it’s just an excuse for a day filled with the other pie.
In honour of the day we’re just starting a round-themed dinner. Two pizzas (topped among other things with round little roasted cherry tomatoes and rounds of veggie sausage), a cherry pie, and a couple dozen wee little lemon tarts. Everything round!
The lemon tarts are an adaptation of the lemon squares in the Veganomicon. Square didn’t fit with the day, so I adapted the recipe to make tarts instead. If you have the book, I highly recommend the recipe — they make perfect little lemon meringueless pies, utterly divine. Just a note: If making tarts, bake the crusts for only 12 to 15 minutes, not the full time in the original recipe. Also, I followed a long-ago tip and filled each tart with about a tablespoon of dry beans to keep the tart crusts from shrinking and ‘puffing’ when I baked them. (But do remember to take all the beans out before filling the tarts with lemony goo.) Yum!
Sekrets revealed
So a while back I made a comment about some Sooper Sekret Projekts I had underway. These were for Valentine’s Day (no real ‘sekret’ there), and since all have finally been delivered I can now post about them. Besides, this way I get in one last free entry before disappearing on vacation for a week. 😉
So, the projects. I wanted to send a Valentines-y surprise parcel, but filled with what? I figured it should be something sweet (Valentines seems a very saccharine festival). Also there should probably be hearts of some sort. Finally, I wanted something a bit more involved than my normal baking, just to show I cared. (Egads, I’m devolving into Hallmark-speak just thinking about it. Enough!)
For prototype projects I chose two things — “Perfect Vegan Sugar Cookies” and the peppermint pucks from Squirrel’s Vegan Kitchen.
The sugar cookies proved fairly easy to make, despite the two-stage process of baking and glazing. I found that the cookies weren’t sweet enough on their own, though, but with the icing they seemed a bit too sweet. (Even if they were pretty!) Admittedly they grew on me as I slowly ate my way through the test batch. *g*
The peppermint pucks (or in my case minty hearts and other assorted shapes) were a pain to make — literally since I singed all my fingertips dipping the mint innards into hot, dark, melty chocolate. But omg, mmmmmm, so good! Peppermint Patties for vegans, woot! (Only better.)
In the end I decided against the peppermint treats as the final winner, though, because they really did need refrigeration to stay nice and firm. (Oh no, that means I still have a dozen of the test batch in the freezer. How will I survive?!?) I just couldn’t be sure they’d survive even a single day in the mail. That meant going with the cookies. But wait, I could borrow from both prototypes! And thus were born chocolate-glazed sugar cookies. The glaze I made from approximately 1 oz unsweetened chocolate, 1 oz good dark chocolate, 1 T corn syrup, and a healthy splash of vanilla. These all melted down in a double boiler, into rich, dark decadence. It was too thick a mixture to dip the cookies, so I had to ‘ice’ them with the molten mixture — quickly, because the chocolate started to set almost as soon as I scooped it up. Overall those cookies were tasty, but I think the dark chocolate glaze actually needed a bit more sweet to it. Next time! I’m told they were very good with peanut butter.
So those were the Sooper Sekret Valentines Projekts. Strangely, I somehow missed taking any shots of the final dark hearts. Fie.
The Lustful Vegan 