Trial and Error: Whole Wheat Vegan Cake

So I learned today that you really can’t just “wing it” when it comes to baking. I’m a big fan of making recipes up on the spot or substituting when I don’t have what they ask for. With baking this often results in a big FLAT cake…lol!

I searched around a bit for a Whole Wheat Cake, still working on not making anything with WHITE flour. I found two recipes that looked good. This Sour Cream Coffee Cake sounded good (using Whole Wheat Flour, as well as this Whole Wheat Walnut Coffee Cake. I’ve also recently been a little obsessed with Alicia Silverstone’s Website The Kind Life and her take on eating Vegan. So I thought I could just combine some recipes and make a cake vegan…lol…it turned out…interesting.

Here is what I did:

Ingredients

• 1/4  cup  packed brown sugar
• 1  teaspoons  ground cinnamon
• 1  cup  granulated sugar (although to do it again I would only use 1/2 cup)
• 1/4  cup Earth Balance (vegan butter)
• 2/3 cup Unsweetened Organic Applesauce
• 1  cup  Vegan Sour cream
• 1  teaspoon  vanilla extract
• 1 3/4  cups Whole Wheat flour
• 1  teaspoon  baking powder
• 1 small apple diced small
• Cooking spray

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350°.

Combine first 2 ingredients; set aside.

Place granulated sugar and butter in a large bowl; beat with a mixer at medium speed until well-blended (about 5 minutes). Add Apple Sauce and Apples, beating well after each addition. Beat in sour cream and vanilla. Lightly spoon flour into dry measuring cups; level with a knife. Combine flour, baking powder, stirring well with a whisk. Gradually add flour mixture to sugar mixture; beat well. Pour into sprayed round pan, sprinkle brown sugar and cinnamon mixture.

Bake at 350° for 45 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean. Cool the cake on a wire rack.

Optional lemon Glaze:

1 cup powdered sugar
2 teaspoons lemon juice
2 to 3 tablespoons water or milk

Pour on top of cooling cake, add fresh sliced strawberries.

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In the end both Mr. Gaunt and I thought this tasted good, but it didn’t really rise. It would have been nice if it had been thicker and fluffier. The whole Wheat Flour gives it a very wheaty taste, I liked it. I will have to keep trying this to see if I can’t find a better recipe…err…a REAL recipe…lol!

In better news, we won our softball game! I kinda pulled my groin so that sucks. I just keep hurting myself, oh well. Hoping to take it easier tomorrow at work, I busted my ass today. Oh and I have Easter pics to show you too! Soon enough.

Using The Beets!

Beet and Potato Roesti

I got Beets in my Door to Door Organics box last week. We have never cooked Beets, nor had I eaten many Beets as a kid. Both Mr. Gaunt and I weren’t sure if we even liked Beets all that much. I searched around Food Gawker for a Beet Recipe, and this one stood out “The Only Way I Can Get My Husband To Eat Beets” Well if it works for her husband, it should work for my boyfriend!

The recipe was pretty easy to follow and pretty quick too. Even the “flipping” of the Beets wasnt to scary (and I usually HATE flipping things). The only thing that I would mention was that her recipe say to use 4-6 Beets that make 1/2 a cup of shredded Beet, but I used 4 (maybe kinda big?) Beets and it made about 2.5 cups. I didn’t want to waste the rest of the shredded Beets so I threw them in a ziplock bag in the freezer. I’ve never frozen any starch product like that, so who knows if it will keep.

Pink Beet Hands!

I used low-fat butter and Fat Free Sour Cream to reduce the calories.I also used Whole Wheat Flour, because that’s all we even have anymore. My feeling is if I can’t make it with Whole Wheat Flour, why bother.  I still thought they had a definite Beet taste (which isn’t bad, just unique) but Mr. Gaunt freaking LOVED these, he ate almost the whole thing! He thought they tasted like a big potato pancake. I was thrilled to see him gobbling up Beets, and I’ll definitely make this again. It says its more of a “side dish” but we just had two slices with a big salad and we were full.

This recipe could also easily be made vegan, just use vegan Butter and vegan Sour Cream!

The recipe is as followed (taken from Dinosaur Dishes: Delicious easy, healthy meals on a shoestring budget):

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Beet and Potato Roesti

serves 4-6 as a side

Ingredients

4-6 medium beets, About a 1/2C when grated
2 small potatoes, scrubbed
salt and pepper
4 scallions, chopped
½ cup flour
2 tablespoons butter

Instructions

Trim and scrub the beets then peel them. Grate them into a medium bowl. Start preheating a large (12″) skillet over medium heat. Working fast, so they don’t discolour, grate the potatoes into the same bowl as well. Add the salt, pepper, and scallions and combine well. Then add the flour a few tablespoons at a time until well combined.

Melt the butter into the skillet until it foams. Put the mixture into the middle of the pan and flatten out with a spatula. It should be a centimeter or thinner. Cook for 8-10 minutes until nice and crispy.

You will need to flip it over. To do this place a large plate over top and flip the frying pan over then slide the roesti back into the pan. Cook until the other side is crispy about another 8 -10 minutes.

Serve hot or at room temperature with green onions on top.  We also like to dollop some sour cream or plain yogurt on each slice.

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Shredding Beets. Be careful because it's so red you can't tell if you cut yourself.

In the pan.

Like a Beet Pizza!

Hello Luvah

Betcha wonder where I’ve been. Well I’ve been working 9 hour shifts starting at 5am! Yup 5am! How fun is that! And since I live between 30-45 minutes from where I work, that means I wake up at 3:30 am! Ha! So yeah, I’ve been going to bed at like 8:30 so I don’t die on my drive to work. Sigh, only one more week of this. I actually have plans to show y’all what I do at work with PICTURES..YAY! but not now. For now I’m enjoying my friday (which started at 9:30 am…the only perk of working long days with a far drive is short Fridays!) so far I took my phone to Verizon because it’s having a weird problem. Of course weird problem wouldn’t do its weird thing when I got there so they really couldn’t do anything for me. Then I got coffee and talked to Mr. Gaunt who is en route to New Mexico for the weekend to visit a friend. Then I had a long talk with my BFF Mallory on the phone about…oh…Life, Love, Babies, God, Religion, Therapy…you know, the usual. Mallory is my dearest friend and the older we get the more we have in common, and although we have been friends since kindergarten, I think age and space had brought us closer…I heart her.

Oh and I lost 1.6 pounds at weigh in on Monday! Go me!

Anyways today I have lovely plans to go to Old Navy because all their jeans are on sale for $19 and I DESERVE new jeans. Right now I’m floating between a 14 and a 16. This sucks, but I have to stop waiting to get smaller, I have to live in the now. I was talking to Kelli the other night about weight loss, she is a bit smaller than me (that slut!) but she seems to be having just as hard of a time accepting her now smaller frame. It really got me thinking, and although I REALLY want to wear a size 10 and I REALLY want to weigh 160, I’m going to live it up here in a size 15! I have worked my butt off and I deserve to be happy and content! I can not keep waiting for the future, I need to appreciate this. If you had asked me a year ago if I could drop 75lbs and 4 pants sizes over night, I would have kissed your face and laid down dead! It would have been the most amazing thing in the world. But since it DIDNT happen over night, it doesn’t feel quite as amazing. This will change today!

Whitney Thompson is ANTM winner season 10, and she’s a 14 and she’s freaking GORGEOUS! Maybe I don’t look too bad either.

Ok moving on from all of that. Im going to scrapbook a bit today, and watch some Big Love and maybe call Ms. G and get some dinner. Im going to enjoy my solo weekend and do things I might not do when Mr. Gaunt is home. It will be a good weekend.

Oh and before I go, I leave you with a list of a few new favorite links (they are also added under BLOGS! tab) enjoy!

Waste Not Thy hour:

-The Clean Eating Mamma (My new role model for sure!)

-Wedding Gawker (by Food Gawker)

-Hello Veggie (Vegetable Love)

-Some Girls Wander (Fashion by The Black Apple)

-Bitch Cakes Commutes (Bitch Cakes Blog about NY commuting)

Eating In. Eating Out.

Well tonight we are eating WAY later than my 6pm rule, but it was pretty much un avoidable. We had couples counseling at 5pm that ran a little late (till 5:30) so we were either eating dinner at 4:00 or now. I chose now. It’s also ok because I wont be going to bed so early tonight because I get a THREE DAY WEEKEND! So I’m ok with pushing things back an hour. I will have to think about counseling for next week and how to fit dinner around it, we will see.

Well tonight we are having a great (AND VEGAN!) dinner!  I am making Skinny Chili Seasoned fries (with my amazing Mandolin I got for Christmas!), the recipe is a video from The WW Chick that you can watch here. They are super easy and pretty much amazing! They also arent fried! Hallelujah! With this we are having Vegan Sloppy Joes (which my BFF Mallory told my are called Sloppy Janes) that we buy in a box from Whole Foods. They are really yummy, even Mr. Gaunt likes them. We have them on Sara Lee 80 Calorie Wheat Buns.

In other news I skipped weigh in this week. I have maintained well and am still sitting 1.5lbs away from my big goal of 75lbs lost. I’m ok with this, I will not dwell. So I missed the meeting, but I do know this weeks topic was on Eating Out. Anyone who has ever attempted to lose weight KNOWS eating out is freaking hard! It just sucks! Mr. Gaunt and I have a few places we feel comfortable eating at (Chilis has a light menu, Water Course has amazing Vegan and vegetarian food, Subway and Chipotle can be safe) (Oh and Eat This, Not That has a website now where you can get all kinds of great restaurant tips!) but it’s still hard. Bitch Cakes, an amazing WW member/blogger who I have raved about before did a great post on her own personal feeling on eating out. I just had to share HER list of reasons for why she doesn’t eat out:

• I don’t trust the cleanliness of the food/kitchen/preparer(s).
• I don’t want to be subjected to/distracted by/tempted by food.
• I don’t like eating while talking (it takes the focus off the food – I feel like dining and socializing should be two separate things).
• I don’t like having other people watch me eat.
• I am vegan and health conscious and don’t believe there’s (for example) no oil or MSG, or I worry that they shared a utensil that touched meat or something else I don’t want to ingest.
• I don’t like using silverware other people have used.
• I don’t want to see/smell meat that other people are eating.
• I know I can make a better, healthier, lower point version of whatever I am going to eat. So why stress myself out *and* pay money for a meal that’s not as enjoyable and also higher in calories, fat and points?

I think this is such a good list! Although I’m not a huge germ-a-phobe, I get what she is saying with cleanliness. She also posts about what she does with friends instead of eating out. Read her whole post HERE! I wish I could separate food with entertainment, it would make life easier.

So that’s about it, just something to think about. We had a really great therapy session tonight, brought up lots of old feelings and made me feel a lot better about things I would have called mistakes. I feel really good about this.

Is This Your Start?

Bitch Cakes AFTER

I know with the new year there is lots of chatter about losing weight, working out, and making a change. My gym is total proof that people are on a healthy kick and trying to shed some pounds. I myself feel like the new year is a great time to get back into working out (I went THREE times this week…Go me!) and am really putting forth the effort to shed these last 45lbs.

Weight loss is so personal, and so hard. Trust me. I feel incredibly lucky that for some reason when I walked into a Weight Watchers on May 4th 2009 with plans to lose weight, it was the right time for me. The stars aligned and the motivation and strength in myself took over, and here I am 8 months later and almost 70lbs lighter! As much I wanted that to happen, I was never sure it would. Just like how I REALLY want to lose 100lbs by 5/4/10 its hard to believe that could happen to me. Why me? Why are there so many people out there struggling to lose weight, and I am making it happen? Theres nothing special about me, I havent become a gym freak, I don’t have a ton of money to hire a personal trainer and nutritionist. I’m just a regular person who has put in 30% (yeah I just made that up) more effort and stuck with it.

The reason I’m talking about this is because I read a really great blog post tonight over on Bitch Cakes Blog. If you havent seen her blog, she is great! Tons of great information on weight loss, vegan eating, weight watchers, and working out. I love her! Anyways I really feel like anyone who is struggling with starting a weight loss regime or is scared or struggling to keep it up should read THIS POST. It said so many things I want to say to people but couldn’t come up with the words. And read her back posts too because theres lots of good information.

Tomorrow I have weigh in, and I really am going! Even if I’ve only lost .5lbs I’m going to be happy with it. I’m also going to keep working out this week to see if I can get to 70lbs lost by a week from tomorrow. Good Luck!

Bitch Cakes BEFORE

Craft Blog

Made a new craft blog. Updates are strictly crafting so I dont bog this one down with that kind of stuff, and so I can direct customers and such to it if I want. Anyways feel free to check it out if you like:

MORGAN MELIM CRAFTS