A post long over due: food porn backlog!

I had a lot going on in the past couple of weeks, like planning stuff for the summer and undergoing dental surgery, but it seems like things are finally looking up and all of the stress is slowly subsiding - phew! Sorry for keeping you waiting, guys. :)

[Some of the photos were taken on my phone, so the quality may not be the best. Whoops~]

Pasta in cream sauce with lemony asparagus.

Mitarashi dango!

It was my second time making dango and it actually turned out okay this time. The sauce was really nice, savoury yet sweet - mhmm! You can read more about dango and all the different variations of it here on the good ol' Wikipedia.

Donuts! And Strawberries, too.. But the donuts are clearly the star here :D

Oh how I wish one of the local bakeries would offer vegan donuts, sadly that's not the case - perhaps someday? This recipe from Cooking Vegan Food Up North was easy to make and it provided me with a generous amount of delicious fresh donuts - highly recommended.

Sesame & Spring Onion Ramen

A plate full of tofu scramble & veggie goodness.

If only I could eat this everyday. Simple pan fried tofu scramble with steamed asparagus, avocado and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar.

Jam & vegan cream cheese sandwiches, a banana, strawberries and raw almond butter.

Onde Onde

Onde Onde are chewy fried rice cakes rolled in sesame seeds and filled with a sweet mung bean paste. I was so surprised to spot these at a local Asian grocery shop, because it's really hard to find freshly made Asian desserts, snacks and bakery style~ goodies for sale here in Germany. Small unexpected finds like this are just the best!

A breakfast food you can't go wrong with: Pancakes!

These came out just perfect. Slightly crispy on the top with just the right amount of fluffy pancake-y goodness on the inside. Topped with a little margarine and golden syrup. Unfortunately I can't remember what recipe I used, possibly one from Vegan Brunch?

Breakfast: Peach green tea and grapefruit.

I wish I had taken a better photo of this because the flesh of the grapefruit had such a nice shade of red, but I forgot to take one with my DSRL. Ah well~, another time.

Rice paper rolls filled with letuce, vegan bulgogi and OJ.

The recipe for the bulgogi can be found on Vegan8Korean. They have three different recipes: Gochujang Bulgogi (hot & spicy), Tempeh Bulgogi and Bulgogi Style Seitan. I have tried the first two and they're both immensely tasty. :)

Vanilla-Pudding & Chocolate Cake

Fluffy vanilla cake, a layer of vanilla pudding and a layer of chocolate ganache. The ganache looked a little funky after it had hardened, but it didn't harm the taste at all. I am not ashamed to say that I ate the entire pan in two days... ^^;

Raw zucchini pasta in cheese sauce with crumbled burger patty leftovers.

Homemade kimchi.

As usual I used Maangchi's recipe: Easy Kimchi (Mak Kimchi)
You can replace the fish sauce with some soy sauce and leave out the squid, no problem! Or you could use this completely vegan recipe by Vegan8Korean, yum!

Well, that's it for now! I hope you're all enjoying summer. Talk to you soon ♥

Coconut-Green Tea (Matcha) Ice Cream

Back in April Germany was blessed with sudden bursts of warmth and sunshine and, naturally, I immediately started to long for ice cream in all variations and flavours. Most of the vegan ice cream flavours that can be found at the shops here in Germany are very simple: chocolate, vanilla and various fruit-sorbets. I love chocolate ice cream and will pick it over vanilla eeevery time, but sometimes it's just nice to branch out a little and to try something unusual or new. I wanted to make my own ice cream as soon as possible, but I also wanted to keep the process relatively simple so I choose coconut milk as my base and matcha powder for an intense flavour. Mhmmm... Shall we get started? :)

Coconut - Green Tea (Matcha) Ice Cream
1 can thick coconut milk
1/3 cup sugar
1 tbs matcha powder
1 tbs powdered vegan lecithin

1) Put all ingredients into a blender and blend on high for about a minute (the sugar needs to be dissolved completely).
2) Pour the mixture into a plastic container, then close the lid and move the container to the freezer. Use a container that is not too small as you will have to stir the mixture later on.
3) Use a strong fork to stir the mixture every hour or so until it's ready for serving.
[You can skip step 2-3 and use an ice cream maker instead, if you own one... Lucky you!^^]


Notes:
• Lecithin works as an emulsifier and stabilizer and thus it helps to freeze the ice cream mixture evenly. I used sunflower lecithin that I bought from eBay, but I think soy derived lecithin should work equally well and it is more easily accessible.
• Matcha can be found in most well stocked asian grocery shops.
• While this ice cream is easily made without an ice cream maker, it will unfortunately harden quite a bit the longer it sits in the freezer. An easy solution would be to use ice lolly/popsicle moulds, this way you don't have to worry about the scooping issue, but you still get to enjoy a creamy iced treat. Another possibility is to prepare the ice cream in the morning so that it'll be ready for immediate consumption at dinner time.

A short update

Ah... Time has flown by and somehow I haven't updated since April. Today I'm just letting you all know that I'll be posting a simple recipe this weekend and some food porn from the last couple of weeks next week!

I hope you are all enjoying summer and I'll talk to you soon! ♥

Daily Eats: Green Tea Chocolate Cookies & Almond Milk

Green tea chocolate filled cookies & almond milk.

Inspired by AliensDayOut's most recent cookie adventure. Like Mipa, I started off with the 'Minono' recipe from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar, an extra tablespoon or two of flour was enough to make the dough work-able and the cookies kept their shape very well. I left out the orange zest because I wasn't sure if the flavour of oranges would work with green tea, but vanilla made a lovely replacement. The filling is made of white chocolate and green tea (matcha) powder and the tiniest bit of vegetable oil - it's incredibly delicious!

Daily Eats: Green Tea Swirl Bread

Homemade green tea (matcha) swirl bread.

RECIPE: Milk bread & variations (via Une-deux senses)

Great, great recipe! You can leave out the egg to make it vegan, it's no problem at all, though you might want to add a little more water or else your dough could be too dry. The left over tangzhong / water-roux can be diluted with water and be used as a vegan 'egg' wash. My bread making skills aren't very good, but I have used the water-roux method used in this recipe before for making bread and it honestly never disappoints. If you've been shying away from making bread at home I suggest you give this recipe a try, it's worth the work. :)

Daily Eats: Crêpes

Crêpes with blueberry filling.

I decided to spoil myself a little today and made some delicious crêpes in the afternoon and filled them with with a blueberry pie style filling, which was my favourite crêpe filling as a child and probably still is (though I do love maple syrup too mhmmm~).

Daily Eats: Breakfast

Bread roll with sweet sugar beet syrup and black coffee.

Daily Eats: Raw Cheesecake with Strawberries

Raw cheesecake with strawberries.

Daily Eats: Veggie Paella

Dinner: Veggie paella with arugula. Jello fruit cup for dessert.

Daily Eats: Chocolate Chip Cookies

Chocolate chip cookie dough.

Daily Eats: Waffle Iron Baked French Toast

Save some time when making French toast by using a waffle iron! Crispy French toast (or maybe waffle toast would be the more appropriate term :)) in no time. My waffle iron can make two waffles at a time so this worked perfectly and it gave me some time to clean last nights dishes while the toast was baking - perfect!

French toast with banana, strawberry jam & vanilla cream + cup of camomile tea.

Daily Eats: Bami Goreng

Bami goreng / Indonesian fried noodles.

Daily Eats: Sweet Azuki Milkshake & Lunch

Lunch: Yubu chobap, steamed sweet potato & a banana.

Sweet azuki shake.

When I made steamed buns on Friday I filled half of the dough with mock meat and the other half with sweetened red bean (azuki) paste. BUT, as it always happens, I made waaay to much of both fillings so I decided to use some of the sweet bean paste to make myself a tasty tasty milkshake: almond milk, some silken tofu, sweetened red bean paste, half a banana and a few ice cubes. Yum!

Brown Short Grain Rice

Brown short grain rice.

Woah, I finally found a shop that sells brown short grain rice in bulk! My rice-consumption has really risen in the past year or so and I've been meaning to try brown rice for a while, but it seemed impossible to find a good (reasonably priced) source here. I'm excited to cook with it in the future to see how it compares to white rice. If anyone has any tips on how to cook brown rice in a rice cooker, send 'em my way, please! :)

Daily Eats: Steamed Buns

Working that dough~

Mock meat filling.

Ready for steaming.

Daily Eats: Afternoon Snack

Toast with margarine & strawberry marmalade, fresh strawberries and a glass of almond milk.

Lemon Cake

Lemon Cake

Since the weather has been so lovely lately and the flowers are slooowly starting to bloom, I thought now would be the perfect time to share the link to my favourite vegan lemon cake recipe with you. I took the photo two years ago, soon after I discovered the recipe on the internet, but have since made this cake countless times and it's still my absolute favourite cake, lemon or otherwise. The recipe is simple, no fancy ingredients or baking techniques, but the outcome is perfect. Moist and delicate and full of flavour - everything you could dream of, so to speak. :)

LINK: Vegan Lemon Cake (via boredbutbusy.com)


On an unrelated note: Previously, you had to log in with google/blogger or other social media networking sites to leave a comment on my blog. This is something I wasn't even aware of this until today (thanks for e-mailing me Julia!)... I changed the settings this afternoon, so you no longer need to register/log in with any services to leave a comment. I'm sorry if this has been an inconvenience to anybody.

Daily Eats: Lunch | Nubian Heritage Soap

Nubian Heritage Coconut & Papaya Soap || Lunch was ramen, kimchi and a can of coke.

The soap was on my iHerb wishlist for a couple of months and I'm really happy I decided to add it to the cart on my latest order because the smell of this soap is out of this world! I can't wait to use this!

Daily Eats: Iced Latte

Iced vanilla latte.

Double shot of espresso, almond milk, a handful of ice cubes and vanilla protein powder (adds flavour, some sweetness and it works as a thickener to make a creamy drink :)).

A Small Challange

I'm challenging myself to post at least a photo per day for an entire month (March 20 - April 20). I've really been slacking with this blog and it's weird, because I actually do have a lot of things and recipes I want to blog about and I did quite well during vegan MoFo in November... But for whatever reason I can't seem to get anything done and I don't want this to be just another failed project in the never ending universe of the interwebz~.. Boo. So I'm putting a tiny bit of pressure on myself with this challenge and hopefully I'll get my groove back. This isn't exactly like Vegan MoFo since my only goal is to post a picture a day of something I cooked, baked or ate that day. Should be doable right? Y'all can come kick my cyber-butt if I miss a day! (keep the different time zones in mind though, I'm not taking a beating just because the day's over in your neck of the woods ;))

Anyways, if any of you bloggers out there would like to join me in this challenge leave me a comment so I can stalk you see what you're up to!

Oh and btw! By the request of a horde of people single lady (yo Allysia!) I will be posting the recipe for savoury oatmeal soon. I meant to post it last week (there we go again..) but it's just that lately I haven't been in the mood to eat savoury oatmeal myself so there wasn't an opportunity. :)

Fudgy brownie with real cocoa nibs.

These were a disaster, extra fudgy brownies ruined by evil cocoa nibs. I thought the nibs would add a nice crunch to the brownies, but they tasted rubbery (perhaps dues to the heat from the baking process?).

Backlog of Food Porn

Blog maintenance went over well, I got everything on my list done: The Recipe and Reviews pages are now updated, tags are sorted out and I added a search function that you can find on the right side. I also made some change to the Subscribe/Follow page. You can subscribe by e-Mail and get each new entry delivered straight to your inbox or stick to the good ol' RSS-feed. I really hope the e-Mail feature works, this is not a feature I use to subscribe to other blogs so I'm not sure how reliable it is and how the formatting of my entries may change, but I thought it was a good idea for those who don't use feed readers. You can find a link to my flickr page too and I would love some flickr buddies, so please get in touch y'all~~.

I didn't get much feedback regarding blog improvement, but you're all welcome to leave a comment or send me a mail anytime if there's anything you would like to see improved or if something is wrong with the layout or blog (dead links/photos for example) and I'll do my best to fix it. :)

Anyhooow.. It's been a while since I've posted some food porn, so I figured today would be as good a day as any to change that. I honestly didn't take many photos during my blogging absence, but spring is around the corner and the sky isn't that god awful shade of grey anymore and so I've gotten back in the habit of taking photos of what I cook and eat again. Everything is just more fun in spring, right? :)

Oatmeal with plums, hemp seeds and dark sugar beet syrup.

Côte d'Or Pistache Noir 70%

This...sounds way better than it actually is, I'm sad to say. :( The pistachio pieces are sooo tiny, you can hardly taste them and when you do they taste like marzipan... I mean, I like marzipan, but that's not quite what I wanted when I bought this. It's not all bad, the dark chocolate tastes nice and that elephant is quite cute as well, but I won't be buying this particular flavour again.

Savoury oatmeal with soy sauce, sesame oil, scrambled tofu, beans, seitan and dried seaweed.

A lazy woman's answer to rice porridge, or bubur like they call it in Indonesia. I absolutely LOVED bubur when I was a child and I still do, but it takes a rather long time to make the classic rice version while it'll only take a couple of minutes if you're using quick cooking oats instead. The recipe is pretty simple, so if anyone's interested I could probably have it up sometime this week. :)

PB filled chocolate pillow.

Last week I finally made the peanut butter chocolate pillows from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar. I had a tub of oversalted homemade PB that needed to be used up... A neat excuse to bake cookies, amIright?! Of course I am, hehe. You really need to try these if you have VCIYCJ, because they're uh-maaaazing. 

N.A! Nature Addicts fruit snack.

Fruit leather seems to have found it's way to Germany. 'bout time, I say. If only those little packets would be a bit a whole lot larger, ahem...

Speculoos oatmeal with hemp seeds.

Oatmeal with walnuts, snickerdoodle style. My current favourite.

Vegan egg (!!), sunny side up.

Soon there won't be anything left for us vegans to veganize, I mean... vegan eggs?! Amazing! They're by no means perfect yet, but they're pretty darn good. The idea came from a thread on the PPK (here).

Soy yoghurt with fresh strawberries.

Green smothie.

Made from hemp+chia seeds, bananas, spinach, soymilk, almond butter. The almond butter made it taste like cookie dough, I'm not even kidding. :)

[The last three photos were taken with my phone, sorry about the quality.]

Daily Eats: Saturday

Cupcake for breakfast.

[I'll be doing some long over-due blog maintenance today: sorting out the tags + updating the Recipes and Review pages. If you have any ideas for improvement, now would be the time to mention it. :)]

Review: Hurraw! & Crazy Rumors

So today's entry is going to be a little different from my other entries. After my cleanser review, back in Novemeber, I tried to stick to blogging about food for Vegan Mofo since blogging about other things seemed so out place and blogging about food is really fun, so it wasn't a hard rule to stick to. But November is long gone now and when I created this blog I wanted to blog about all sorts of things, not just food. So don't be surprised if you see non-food related blog-posts in the future. :)

Anyway... I'm starting off with some lip balm reviews. Everybody likes lip balms, right? I was googling for some swatches last week and somehow ended up reading a review on Hurraw! lip balms on another blog. Incidentally the blogger mentioned that she bought her balms from Super Smoocher's website and that they were having 20% off all vegan products. Needless to say I had a closer look. Turns out Super Smoocher is an English online shop dedicated to all things lip care related. They carry two all vegan brands: Crazy Rumors and Hurraw! I decided to give them a try and ordered six balms for myself and another two for a friend.

The sale is going on for another couple of days, so make sure to check it out if you're in need of some lip balms. I qualified for free shipping, but shipping prices are very reasonable and EU citizens don't have to worry about import taxes since their warehouse is situated in the UK. Delivery was quick, six days (weekend included) to be precise, though times probably vary depending on the destination. Overall I was very happy with my purchase there and would recommend them. You can check out their shop here: SuperSmoocher

Both brands are sold for the same price (at the moment) and you get 15oz per tube, that is 4.2g for the Crazy Rumors ones and 4.3g for the Hurraw! ones. I found them both to be hydrating and relatively long lasting and they both go on clear, there's no white tint to them or anything. The Crazy Rumors one seems a little harder in texture compared to the Hurraw! balms, but there isn't much of a difference really. Both companies' products are all natural and vegan! :)

For more information about the actual lip balms, check out these websites:

Hurraw! and Crazy Rumors

Super Smoocher's cute packaging! Love is in the air... errr.. on the lips.

I don't know if this is because Valentine's Day is nearing, but the packaging (including the hearts) was a nice surprise. Cute!

Hurraw's Coffee Bean & Chai Spice Lip Balms

Coffee Bean I was hesitant about ordering this one, as I am not someone who likes overly sweet smells, but I was not disappointed. This actually smells like coffee beans, none of that super sweet artificial smell, hooray hurraw! The coffee balm is one of the stronger smelling balms in this batch. I personally haven't gotten a headache from this (yet?), but just so you know. Some people are very sensitive to strong smells and it's certainly something to consider when you put something on your lips, so close to your nose.

Chai Spice Yum! Mhmm, this is a nice one. The balm is infused with cinnamon and cardamon - just right for all of you chai junkies (I know you're out there!).

Hurraw's Grapefruit & Lemon Lip Balms

Grapefruit This smells just like Mamba Fruit Chews, but not obnoxiously so. Although I do have to restrain myself with this, every time I lift the cap I feel like taking a bite! :) I was a little disappointed to find out that this is not one of Hurraw's tinted lip balms, for some reason I assumed it would be, but it's not. It's no big deal since I love the smell so much, but I'd love to see more tinted balms in Hurraw's product line. Maybe in the future?

Lemon I find that a lot of citrus scents used in cosmetics and skin care products have the tendency to smell artificial, similar to those awful anti-mosquito candles. You know, the ones they sell in garden-supply stores? Shudder. Luckily this isn't the case with this one. The smell is natural and subtle, very fresh! Definitely one of my favourites in this batch and something I would buy again.

Crazy Rumors' Apple Spice & Hurraw's tinted Cinnamon Lip Balms

Apple Spice Crazy Rumors have an insanely HUGE variety of lip balms! I had a hard time choosing, it was a little overwhelming to be honest. But eventuelly I did settle on two balms: Apple Spice from the Brew Collection and Peppermint from the Sugar Cane Collection. The Peppermint one is a belated Christmas gift for someone, so I couldn't open it, unfortunately.. Sad face. But the Apple Spice one is aaaall mine! The smell is great: a little something sweet, a little something sour with a little bit of spice. I don't know about the rest of their balms, but this one doesn't smell too sweet either so I really lucked out it seems. :)

Cinnamon (tinted) Drumroll please, let me introduce you to the only tinted lip balm from my package. I may not wear lipstick all that often, but I do have an unhealthy obsession with tinted lip products: balms, butters, glosses - the whole lot. The cinnamon balm is one of the two tinted lip balms in Hurraw's line of products, the other one being Black Cherry, which is a sheer deep/dark red shade from what I've read. The cinnamon balm smells, well, like cinnamon. Big surprise there! ;) The shade is a sheer coral-red, see the photos for a closer look!

Bare lips.

I made sure to wipe my lips with a wet tissue, so you guys can see what my bare lips look like for reference.

Wearing the Tinted Cinnamon Lip Balm on my lips.

I think the balm looks rather natural on my lips, no? Just a bit of colour (and care), nothing too exciting, a nice everyday "go-to" balm.

Close Up.

Smooooth! Compare this to the bare lips photo, looks like my lips went to the spa all on their own. Hehe.

Swatch for the tinted cinnamon balm.

I figured a swatch on white background would give you a better idea of what the color looks like. The photo is pretty much true to the colour. 


So yeah, that's it. Have any of you experience with either of these lip balm brands? Let me know what you think and ask away if you have any question! :)