Pecan and Apple Muffins

These muffins are from the Joy of Vegan Baking. I adore these muffins and they are certainly better than regular muffins fof the following reason.

1. Ground flaxseed. Get your omega 3s from flaxseeds rather than egg. Using egg means that your can’t lick the bowl, it makes your muffins contain cholsteoral and of course there was no suffering my any sentient beings to produce them. Flaxseed will keep indefinately (Keep ground flax in the freezer as it will go rancid). Eggs can spoil. Who wants to risk cracking an ‘off’ egg in to their muffin mix! Eggs also don;t have any fibre. Flax is chockers with the stuff.

2. Pecans. A find from my recent trip to Bali. Whole nuts in your muffins gives you fibre, stacks of protein and other fab stuff.

3. Apple and apple sauce: Some natural sweetness, reduces the need for as much oil and of course there are all those lovely phytochemicals that we need in our diet.

4. Wholemeal flour. While this recipe is not exclusively wholemeal flour makes up a quarter of the flour. Better than most refined muffins.

All the dry ingredients

How are my apples chopped so uniformly? Answer? A mandolin. One of fav kitchen tools.

The dough

Ready for the oven

Seb’s eaten 4 already.

Cinnamon Coffee Cake

This cake is a wonderful recipe from The Joy of Vegan Baking. I’ve made it a stack of times, especially for colleagues and it usually gets rave reviews. Despite its title, it doesn’t contain coffee, instead it has ginger, cinnamon and walnuts. Coffee cake is actually supposed to be eaten for breakfast, (I know… Those North Americans ARE weird. Cake for breakfast?) and it usually has some sort of crumble topping. I really like this recipe. No special egg-replacers are needed (vinegar only) and the same goes for non-dairy butters and it makes such a lovely moist cake. Terrible pictures but the cake sure tasted good.

A Baking Class at my House.

One of my delightful colleagues, Sam has two equally delightful teenaged girls. They will be heading off on to university in a couple of years, and Sam is keen to give them a few lessons in cooking so that they can prepare healthy, cheap and nutritious food so we arranged for them all to come to my house today to do some cooking. They do not have much experience in baking, so we decided to start with some delicious jam filled oat bran muffins and choc brownies. They did a fantastic job. Such a lovely afternoon. 🙂

Blueberry and Lemon Muffins

Seb is heading out on shoot over the next 10 days and he does struggle with finding food outside of Bangkok. He doesn’t like a huge variety of vegetables, so he does find it challenging. I decided to cheer him up a bit by making him his favourite muffins. He is a massive blueberry fan and loves these ones. They are from The Joy of Vegan Baking and are so easy to make.

Choc Chip and Oatmeal Cookies

These cookies are from The Joy of Vegan Baking by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. I took a batch of these to work and they were gobbled up pretty quickly. The fact they have oatmeal in, means that you eat them for breakfast without guilt!