Sunday Brunch

Pancakes are the perfect brunch for a lazy Sunday morning. These are extremely easy to make (the batter is made by basically just measuring all the ingredients into a bowl and whisking). Cooking the pancakes can be a challenge for some people. Just make sure the pan isn't too hot or the pancakes will burn before they are firm enough to be flipped around. The smaller the pancake the easier it is to cook it. Also remember to use enough oil!

Pancakes don't sound like a very healthy breakfast but I made these with whole wheat flour and there's only one tablespoon of sugar! The blueberries add some sweetness and also have lots of vitamins. The pancakes do suck in a lot of oil while they're being cooked but vegetable oils have a lot of vital unsaturated fats.

Vegan Blueberry pancakes

• 2½ decilitres (whole wheat) flour
• 1 tablespoon cane sugar
• 1½ tablespoons baking powder
• 1½ tablespoons oil
• 2,5 decilitres soy/grain milk
• 1½ decilitres (fresh or frozen) blueberries

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. Whisk in oil and milk. Stir well. Fold in the blueberries.

Drop two spoonfuls of batter on a hot greased pan. Cook it until the pancake is firm enough to be flipped around. Cook until both sides have browned (Remember to add oil on the pan in between cooking each pancake!).

Serve with honey or maple syrup.

Peanut Butter!

Here's another excellent vegan biscuit recipe. These are not chewy like the double chocolate-chip cookies but they have a nice and rich peanut butter flavour. Peanut butter is something that every vegan should at least sometimes have in their cupboards. As a vegan you can't put cheese on your bread to get some proteins so peanut butter is a great choice. It also has vital unsaturated fats and magnesium. Make sure that you choose unsweetened peanut butter. The ingredients list should have the maximum of two ingredients, that is peanuts and salt. So if you happen to have some of this delicious butter in your kitchen cupboard why not bake something with it!

Fruity baby-foods are excellent egg-replacements in baking. You can just as well use any fruit mash but baby foods just come in such good portion sizes (a rule of the thumb is to replace one egg with one small can of baby food). You can choose pretty much any flavour you like but in this recipe I recommend using something yellow, like mango or peach.

Vegan Peanut Butter Chocolate-chip Cookies 

Makes approximately 20 cookies.

• 100 grams margarine
• 1½ decilitres cane sugar
• 1 decilitre mango flavoured baby food (or fruit mash)
• 1 teaspoon vanilla sugar
• 1 1/4 decilitres smooth peanut butter
• 3 decilitres flour (I used half whole wheat and half all-purpose flour)
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 80 grams dark vegan chocolate chips

Preheat the oven into 175°C. Cover a sheet pan with bakery paper. Beat the butter and sugar with a mixer until it's fluffy. Beat in the peanut butter, vanilla sugar and baby food. Mix the flour and baking soda in a separate bowl. Add the dry ingredients into the peanut butter-mixture and mix well. Fold in the chocolate chips. If the batter is too soft to form into balls put it in the fridge to cool down.

Roll the dough into approximately 3cm balls. Place them on the baking sheet 5cm apart. Press the balls down with a fork to make a crisscross pattern. Bake the cookies for 10 minutes or until the edges have just slightly started to brown. Let the cookies cool down.

Summer in your mouth

I wanted to come up with some use for the blueberries in the freezer that were picked up last summer. Blueberry muffins are such a classic baked good and there probably are as many blueberry muffin recipes as there are bakers. Even though muffins are easy to make, they are surprisingly hard to get right. They often end up too dry, too fluffy or too sweet. This recipe gives them the perfect texture and a wonderful rich taste. These simply happen to be the best blueberry muffins I've ever tasted. And the best thing is that they're egg-free and can easily be made vegan! Just use soy yoghurt and soy/grain milk. If you use dairy products please choose the organic option. I made a few changes into the recipe but the original one can be found in http://www.inerikaskitchen.com.

You can use either frozen or fresh blueberries. If you use frozen ones don't defrost them! Otherwise the berries will bleed into the batter and the whole batter will turn blue. Take the berries out of the freezer just before adding them. Half of the flour I used was whole wheat and the texture was still great. I also added 70 grams of dark chocolate chips because we just happened to have some chocolate in our cupboard. The chocolate is a great bonus and adds some extra richness to the flavours.

Vegan/ Egg-free Blueberry Muffins

• 4 decilitres flour (I used 2 decilitres whole wheat and 2 decilitres all-purpose flour)
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1½ decilitres cane sugar (and more for sprinkling)
• 1 1/4 decilitres soy/grain/organic milk
• 1 1/4 decilitres soy/organic yoghurt
• 75 grams margarine
• 4 decilitres blueberries

Preheat the oven into 200°C. Place 12 muffin tins on a sheet pan. Mix the flour, baking powder and soda in a large bowl. Place the sugar, milk, yoghurt and butter in a bowl and microwave it for one minute or until the butter starts to melt. Whisk until there are only little bits of butter floating in the mixture. Add the blueberries into the flour and toss to coat. Slowly and carefully add the milk-butter-mixture in.  Fold until just incorporated. Don't over-mix! Little streaks of flour are okay. Divide the batter into the tins and sprinkle sugar on top. Bake for 25-28 minutes or until a toothpick comes out with just a few crumbles clinging to it and they have a nice golden brown colour. Let the muffins cool down.

A not-so-traditional Italian delicacy

We had some guests coming for a visit and I had to come up with something to bake. We have a several decades old bottle of Amaretto liqueur sitting in our shelf and I decided to give it some use. The result was a bit modified version of the classic Italian delicacy. The cacao-flavoured sugar cake absorbs a lot of liquid so the cake is deliciously moist. The quark adds freshness to mascarpone and the coffee and Amaretto just make it perfect. If you don't want to use Amaretto any almond or coffee liqueur is fine. If you want to avoid alcohol you can also use water and almond extract. 

A word of warning: This recipe is not vegan. Nor is it healthy. But it's so incredibly delicious that it makes up for all that. Because of both ethical and nutritional reasons I use only organic dairy products and eggs. The factory farm cows are pumped full of hormones to make them grow faster and they are also fed with antibiotics to prevent them from getting infections. All of that is in their milk so next time you buy milk think of all the hormones and drugs you're putting in your body. The same thing applies to the eggs. Also several viruses, like the H1N1 spread from factory farms. Using growth hormones and drugs is forbidden in organic farming so at least when buying organic animal products you know what you're eating.

This recipe is a lot easier than the traditional tiramisu recipes but it has the same wonderful taste of Italy. I highly recommend using organic eggs and dairy products to not only make the cake taste better but to also make it better for you.

Organic Quark Tiramisu

Cake:

• 4 organic eggs
• 1½ decilitres cane sugar
• 1 decilitre flour ( feel free to use whole wheat)
• 1½ decilitres dark unsweetened cacao powder (and more for sprinkling)
• 1 teaspoon baking powder

Moistening:

• 1 decilitre strong black coffee
• ½ decilitre Amaretto liqueur

Filling:

• 2 organic eggs
• ½ decilitre sugar
• 250 grams organic quark
• 250 grams organic mascarpone cheese
• 3/4 decilitres orange/apricot marmelade

First prepare the cake. Preheat the oven into 200°C. Cover a sheet pan with bakery paper. Sift together the flour cacao powder and baking powder. Beat together eggs and sugar until the mixture has thickened and turned pale yellow. Mix the dry ingredients into the sugar-egg mixture. Spread the batter on a sheet pan and bake for 10 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Lay the cake upside down on a another bakery paper sprinkled with sugar and carefully remove the paper it was baked with.

Now prepare the filling. First beat the eggs and sugar just like you did with the batter. In a separate bowl beat together quark and mascarpone. Add the mascarpone-mixture into the egg-sugar-mixture and mix well. Mix in the marmalade.

Cut the cake in half. Mix together the coffee and Amaretto. Use half of the moistening on one half of the cake. Spread half of the filling on the cake. Lay the second half on top, moisten it and spread the rest of the filling. Sift some cacao powder on top. Let the cake rest in the fridge for at least a couple of hours before serving (you may also prepare it the day before serving).

Read more about factory farming:

In English:
http://www.greathealthconnection.com/2011/meat-from-factory-farms-full-of-dangerous-hormones/

In Finnish:
http://kulma.net/mkevat/hormooni.html
http://www.taloussanomat.fi/ihmiset/2011/02/06/taman-jalkeen-et-enaa-syo-elaimia/20111728/12

A Taste of Childhood

All of us have those foods that just instantly take us back to childhood and to me Karelian pasties are one of those. The rye crust and the soft barley, rice or potato filling just get me every time. It's such a shame that it's so difficult to find good Karelian pasties from the shops anymore. Most manufacturers mix wheat and other grains with rye in the crust and add way too much salt. The filling is often tasteless and the crust isn't crispy like it should be. The reason for this can be found when you take a look at the ingredients of these ready-made Karelian pasties.

Karelian pasties with barley (on left) and potato filling (on right).

Let's take Vaasan's "Isoäidin rukiinen karjalanpiirakka" (meaning Grandmother's Karelian pasty made with rye) as an example. Home-made Karelian pasties have six ingredients: milk, rice/barley, whole wheat rye flour, water, oil and salt. Vaasan's Karelian pasties in the other hand have 16 ingredients. Here's the list:

Water, rice 25%, rye flour, vegetable oil, wheat flour, whole wheat rye flour, vegetable fat, carrot, wheat gluten, sugar, salt (1,0%), glucose, rye malt, milk protein, flavours, colouring (E 160a = beta-carotene). The rye-content is 8%.

The number one thing you should remember when reading ingredients-lists is that the ingredient which was used the most is the first one on the list. Next time you go to the supermarket next time just check how many products have water right at the top of the ingredients-list and you'll be surprised. The reason for this is very simple: the more water there is in the product the cheaper it is to make. Even though the very name of this product suggests that it's made with rye, there's also wheat mixed in. Some things on the list are just confusing. Why is there carrot in Karelian pasties? Or why is there sugar? glucose? wheat gluten? milk protein? colouring? artificial falovours? My grandmother sure didn't need to use food colouring to make her pasties look nice and tasty.

I've actually made Karelian pasties just a couple of times so I'm definitely not an expert. Believe it or not - they're actually pretty easy to make. The only tiring part is forming the pasties since it takes quite a lot of time. If you want to make these pasties note that it takes a couple of hours.

Karelian pasties (or Karjalanpiirakat)

Barley filling:

• 2 1/4 decilitres whole barley
• 3 decilitres water
• 1,5 decilitres oat/organic milk
• 1 teaspoon salt

Potato filling:

• 10 potatoes
• ½ decilitre oat/organic milk
• ½ tablespoon margarine

Pasty dough:

• 2½ decilitres water
• 6 decilitres whole wheat rye flour
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon vegetable oil

• vegetable oil or melted margarine mixed with milk for brushing

Choose which filling you want to use (you can also make rice porrige) or you can make half of each.

Barley filling: Bring the water to the boil and add the barley. When the water has absorbed into the barley, add milk and salt. Reduce the heat and let it simmer for 40-60 minutes while stirring. Be very careful since milk is burned very easily.

Potato filling: Peel the potatos and cut them in squares. Boil the squares for 10-20 minutes until they're soft. Pour out the water. Puree the potatos and add milk and margarine.

Let the filling cool down.

Pasty dough: Measure water into a bowl. Add salt and oil. Start adding the flour. First whip it in but eventually you have to use your hand to knead the dough. Let the dough rest for a little while.

Preheat the oven into 300°C Place a sheet pan into the oven to get it heated as well. This way the pasties will be nice and crispy.

Sprinkle some flour on the table you're using so the dough doesn't stick. Roll the dough into a long "snake" and cut it into small slices. Roll the slices into balls and cover them with plastic wrap so they don't dry.

Use a rolling pin to roll out the balls into very thin disks. Cover the disks with plastic wrapping. Sprinkle some flour on each disk before you pile the next one on top of it so they don't stick to each other. Once the disks are ready, it's time to start forming the pasties!

Spread some filling on the disk. Raise the edges of disks towards the centre pinching with you're fingers to make an oval-shaped pasty. Place the pasties on bakery paper. Carefully take the hot sheet pan out of the oven and slide the bakery paper with the pasties on the pan. Put it in the oven and bake for 10 minutes or until they look ready. 

Brush the pasties with canola oil or milk-margarine-mixture after you've baked them (do the brushing while the pasties are still hot).

Step-by-step pinching:

... We have cookies!

I love biscuits. Who doesn't? But good vegan biscuit recipes are quite hard to find. I love big American-style chewy cookies but in those recipes eggs are often a vital ingredient. These cookies are chewy, chocolaty and absolutely delicious - you wouldn't believe they're vegan! (original recipe from http://www.food.com/)

The dough is quite different from you're typical cookie dough. The amount of dry ingredients seems huge compared to the amount of wet ingredients and you have to use your hand or an electric dough mixer to get all of them mixed in. It's still quite easy to roll balls from the dough. There are no saturated fats in this recipe and even though there's a lot of sugar I used cane sugar which is a bit healthier option. I didn't feel like being a health-freak while baking these cookies but feel free to replace part of the all-purpose flour with whole wheat flour.

If you want to try something different try replacing the chocolate chips with chopped nuts (any nuts are fine). And why not try using white chocolate chips?

Chewy Vegan Double Chocolate-Chip Cookies  (30-40 biscuits)

• 1 3/4 decilitres canola oil
• 4½ decilitres cane sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla sugar/extract
• 1 tablespoon (ground) flax seeds
• 1 decilitre soy/grain milk
• 4½ decilitres flour
• 1 3/4 decilitres dark unsweetened cacao powder
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 3 decilitres vegan chocolate chips

Preheat the oven into 175°C. Cover a sheet pan with bakery paper. If you're using whole flax seeds, grind the seeds in a blender (if you have ground flax seeds just place them in a bowl). Add soy/grain milk and blend/whip the mixture for a little while and set aside. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, cacao powder, baking soda and vanilla sugar (if you use vanilla extract add it to the flax-milk-mixture). Cream the sugar and oil in a large bowl. Mix in the flax-milk-mixture. Slowly mix in the dry ingredients. Eventually you have to use your hand to get it all mixed in. You can also use an electric dough mixer to do this. Fold in the chocolate chips.

Roll the dough into balls that have a diameter of 2,5-3cm. Place the balls on the pan and flatten them (diameter app. 4-5cm). Don't place the cookies too close to each other. Bake for 10 minutes. They might not seem ready yet but they are. Let them cool down on the pan for 5 minutes and a place them on a cooling rack to cool down completely.

Chocolate + Raspberries = Heaven

There's just something in the combination of dark chocolate and raspberries. And there's just something about brownies. They're so easy to make and are perfect for satisfying sweet cravings. Usually brownies are made with bleached flour, white sugar and eggs but these brownies are a bit healthier option. They're made with cane sugar and whole wheat flour (I used 1½ dl whole wheat and 1 dl all-purpose flour but you can also use 2½ dl whole wheat flour). Margarine in the recipe can be replaced with canola oil if you don't like using saturated fats (even though margarine is vegetable fat, the double bonds between individual carbon atoms in the fatty acid chain are broken so it is artificially made saturated). The darker the chocolate you use, the healthier yout brownies will be (the chocolate I used contained 50% cacao but you can choose a darker one if you wish). There are also vitamins in raspberries and the cholesterol-rich eggs are replaced with healthy bananas.

Vegan-baking is a skill that takes time to master. It takes a lot of experimenting to find good egg-replacements but mashed fruit is often a really good choise. In this recipe mashed bananas make the browies moist and firm. Apple/pear mash also works well. Use one decilite of fruit mash to replace one egg. You can also use half a decitre of soy/potato starch flour to replace an egg. Soy yogurt works in some recipies as well. Milk is easy to replace just by using soy/grain milk. Gelatin can be replaced by using agar-agar (a gelatinous substance derived from polysaccharides in red algae).

I've made some changes into this recipe but original one can be found in the revised edition of the Vegan Cookbook released by an animal rights organisation Fauna. I got the book when I was in Like publishing company in work practice. That cookbook is what really got me into vegan cooking.

The reason I love this recipe so much is because it's so variable! Instead of raspberries you can use blueberries (I know blueberry brownies might sound weird but they're delicious), cranberries or orange peel and a tiny bit of orange juice. You can use pretty much any nuts you like, hazelnuts, walnuts, almonds, pecans etc. If don't like nuts or you're allergic try using coconut flakes or chopped oat/digestive biscuits. Just use your imagination!

Vegan Chocolate-Raspberry Brownies

• 1½ decilitres whole wheat flour
• 1 decilitre all-purpose flour
• 1 decilitre dark unsweetened cacao powder
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 2 teaspoons vanilla sugar (or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract)
• 2 decilitres cane sugar
• 2 bananas
• 2 decilitres melted (vegan) margarine
• 100 grams vegan dark chocolate chips

• 80 grams chopped hazelnuts
• 100g (frozen) raspberries

Preheat the oven into 200°C. Cover a sheet pan with bakery paper. Mix the dry ingredients (not sugar). Mash the bananas and mix with sugar and melted margarine (you can get a smooth mixture if you use a blender but you can also mash the banana by using a fork and mix in the sugar and margarine). Carefully mix the dry ingredients into the banana-margarine mixture. Fold in the chcolate chips, chopped hazelnuts and raspberries. Spread the dough on a sheet pan and bake for 20-25 minutes. Let the brownie cool down before cutting into squares. If you have a big oven you might want to do 1,5x dough and bake it a bit longer.