Vegan cheese foam

But Nugget, aren't you a carnivore who loves cream?

Yes, I is! The nugget wasn't setting out to create a vegan cheese foam, it just sort of happened based on other requirements.

The foam is really stable, pretty fuss-free to put together, AND it tastes like cheese foam! All the cheese foam recipes I found either required planning ahead (softened cream cheese), or wouldn't taste like cheese at all. I like coconut milk, and I like maple syrup. I am completely unconvinced that the combination of the two tastes like any sort of cheese. :P

Requirements

  • Must not require planning (pft, wait for cream cheese to soften, pft).
  • Should ideally use ingredients with a long shelf life.
  • Must be brainlessly easy to assemble. Also fast.

Ingredients

  • 50 ml soy milk (I recommend Bonsoy, or Vitasoy manufactured in Taiwan)
  • 2 tsp white sugar (don't use a syrup, white sugar gives this its structure)
  • 1/4 tsp salt (or to taste)
  • 1/2 tsp nutritional yeast <-- this is what makes it taste like cheese

Make it!

  1. Put all ingredients in a microwave safe container, tall enough to whip the stuff in (you want a cheese foam after all).
  2. Stir until combined.
  3. Warm in microwave in 15s intervals (you want it warm, or hot, not boiling).
  4. Whip / froth with milk frother (I recommend Aerolatte) about 20-30s, you should have a stable foam.
  5. Pour on top of drink!

Notes on ingredients

  • Bonsoy, and the Vitasoy made in Taiwan do not contain oil. Soy milk w/o oil is what I grew up with, and I intensely dislike the mouthfeel of plant "milks" that have added oil.
  • You can probably substitute another plant milk for soy milk, but ideally choose one w/o a strong flavour.
  • If possible, choose a plant milk w/o the added oil (this could just be my prejudiced young age imprinting speaking haha).
  • Nutritional yeast can be found a most health food stores. It makes things taste like cheese w/o cheese being added. It's shelf stable, and doesn't need to be refrigerated.
  • Don't combine cow milk AND soy milk foam. The cow milk in the drink will kill the foam structure of the soy milk foam really fast.
  • You can substitute plant milk for cold heavy cream, whipped to soft peaks.
    When using heavy cream, don't heat it in the microwave, or it won't whip happily. Just stir the ingredients in, then whip. You will need to carefully spoon and ladle the foam onto your drink, and it may not stay stable for long if your drink is hot. Use dairy in your drink too (see previous point about cow milk killing soy milk foam).
  • Aerolatte milk frothers are awesome. I've had mine for almost 10 years now. I bought another one from a diff brand to use in the office a few years ago, and it's terrible. It doesn't make nice froths! 

Strawberry goop shortbread cookie-tart aka tapioca flour is magical!

We've been thickening savoury sauces with tapioca starch for a while now. We like it better than cornstarch, because it doesn't muddy the flavour of things the way cornstarch does.

At some point, we decided to thicken a pie filling with tapioca starch. <.< There's no going back. Tapioca starch is magical in fruit filling type goops. It makes everything so wonderfully blobby and clear and pretty, without being sticky and tacky. And it even re-bakes nicely, if you want to stuff it in a puff pastry and bake it.

Strawberry yuzu goop

Makes about 500g of goop. Don't worry about measuring exactly. :P I don't really measure stuff, and this is all conjecture anyway haha. If you use too much tapioca starch, you'll just end up with a more solid and bouncy goop.

Ingredients

  • 500g strawberries, chopped
  • 30g~ of honey citron tea - brand doesn't matter, they're all nice (yuzu is wonderful with strawberries)
  • 30g~ tapioca starch
  • 30ml water
  • white sugar to taste (depends on how sweet your berries are)
  • ground cardamom to taste

Steps to reproduce

  1. Chop the strawberries into fingernail-sized bits. It's okay if your fingernails are giant or midget. All fingernail sizes are welcome.
  2. Dump chopped strawberries, sugar, honey citron tea, and ground cardamom in a small pot of your choice (needs to be big enough to hold all your strawberries, obviously).
  3. In a separate bowl, add water to the tapioca starch and swirl it around till it forms a slurry. Don't skip this step! If you just dump the tapioca flour into the pot with the rest, you'll end up with tapioca lumps.
  4. Add tapioca flour slurry to the rest of the stuff in the pot.
  5. Cook at low to medium heat for about 10 minutes, stirring pretty much all the time. Yeah, it sucks. :( I hate stirring.
    The tapioca slurry will look white at first, but once it's done, it'll turn clear.
  6. When the strawberries are squishy enough for your taste, and everything is goopy and clear, it's done.

The goop is great both hot and cold, and it reheats and bakes well. So once you have the goop, go on and GOOP ALL THE THINGS!

Gloriously lazy lemon blueberry egg white food processor cookies!

Yes! These cookies contain food processor! :P

Everything except adding the blueberries and shaping the cookies into balls is done in a food processor. You prolly want a sturdy food processor though, my last puny one died in horror at the thought of having to make a whole lemon tart.

Why egg whites? Because we had some left over and I wanted to get rid of them.

Why brown sugar? To make up for the lack of egg yolk.

Why not just cream the cookies? I was curious to see whether this 'reverse creaming' method works for cookies too. It works great for scones, cupcackles, and pie crusts after all. And also because washing the food processor is less work than beating in flour or folding it in with a spoon, and for me, the lazier a recipe, the better. Plus, this requires no planning (no leaving the butter out), and no guess-nuking to soften the butter. Lastly, I hate creaming butter, the sugar always tries to escape, and I get bored standing there with the hand mixer...

Chewy inside, crispy outside lemon cookie!
400g cake flour
100g salted butter (room temp)
150g white sugar
50g dark brown sugar
60g egg white
Zest from 1 lemon
Juice from half a lemon (50ml~)
Some dried blueberries (fresh ones will leak horribly)
Vanilla essence

  1. Throw butter, sugars, cake flour into food processor
  2. Pulse until breadcrumby
  3. Add lemon zest
  4. Pulse some more
  5. Add vanilla essence and lemon juice to whirring food processor
  6. Pulse until dough looks right - sort of like plasticine
  7. Mix in blueberries
  8. Plop in fridge for about an hour
  9. Preheat oven to 150-60C
  10. Make (large) truffle-sized balls, try to get at least one blueberry per cookie
  11. Plop balls about 2 inches apart on cookie sheet
  12. Bake for 20~ minutes, until edges are slightly brown


Green tea white chocolate & dark chocolate truffle bar things

Dark chocolate base is exactly the same as the hazelnut pistachio strawberry osmanthus truffle bar things, except without hazelnut essence.

I'm not a huge fan of white chocolate (too sweet for me), but a work human really likes these - he took this photo - so I'm plopping the green tea white chocolate part here.

Ingredients

  • 50ml sweetened condensed milk (aka 1 part)
  • 100g white chocolate (aka 2 parts)
    Broken into squares it comes in. I'm too lazy to do more than that.
  • some matcha (about a teaspoon)
    You can get a cheap matcha from an Asian grocery ($5 or so for a small tin). Just make sure it's actually matcha, from Japan, or it will likely be waaaaay too bitter.
    T_T I thought I could be a cheapo-nug and get a 500g bag of green tea powder from Taiwan. Don't do it!!! That stuff is foul.
    Don't use ceremonial matcha (the stuff the ninja ladies in Lustbader books do tea ceremonies with) - other than being very expensive, IMO it's a waste. You lose the umamis and delicate flavours once the white chocolate steamrolls over them.
Crafting
  1. Dump white chocolate in a bowl.
  2. Shove bowl in microwave, melt at half power for 15s.
  3. Stir.
  4. Repeat Step 2 and 3 until there are just a few nubs of unmelted white chocolate left.
    Should be about 3 - 5 minutes or so of heating in total. Do NOT just set the microwave to half power for 3 minutes and nuke. You need to do the irritating nuke and stir because white chocolate burns very very easily. If you just nuke without stirring, it will burn, and there's no saving it. Well, you could pretend you wanted to 'caramelise' it. XD You can also do all this on a water bath if you want. ;)
  5. Stir until the unmelted white chocolate goes away.
  6. Plop in condensed milk, stir stir stir till incorporated.
    It will look a bit greasy, don't worry about it. :)
  7. Assuming you've also made the dark chocolate bottom, pour that into some kind of (parchment-paper-lined) pan, make pathetic attempt at forming some sort of 'slab'.
  8. Plop the green tea white chocolate blob on top, and make a further sad attempt at slabbing it evenly.
  9. Decorate in a suitably 'artisanal' fashion.
  10. Put gently in fridge (no need to cover unless your fridge has stinky things).
  11. Ignore for at least 4 hours.
  12. Remoof from fridge, cut into squares.
  13. Eat all the leavings that are ~_o 'unfit for presentation'.

Ceremonial matcha
I realised I was doing too much matcha-ranting in the ingredients section, so I moved that here...

This matcha is one of my favourite ceremonial matchas, and is great value for money for drinking.

O-cha are great, and buying from them is cheaper (shipping included) than buying matcha locally in Australia. And the quality is amazing.

If you're curious about matcha brewed usucha or koicha style, then I'd advise getting some overpriced and expensive Australian stuff (T2, kenkotea, etc), and only then getting stuff from O-cha. Then you'll really be able to compare a good matcha with a terrible (or badly stored) one. ;)


    Chocolate mousse with green tea biscuit moss, icing flowers, and fairies!

    So cute! Also super simple, and not as fiddly as it looks.

    The only thing we actually made was the mousse.

    Would have been prettier with fresh, edible flowers. But a lot more perishable, so I didn't use them. Also, I was too lazy to go the market to get those...

    Ingredients
    Coles icing sugar flowers     - I wanted the roses, but the Coles I went to didn't have them. :(
    Coles 100s & 1000s aka fairies - not the shiny silver fairies, the cute pastel fairies! Also known as dragees.
    Green tea & adzuki bean biscuit, crushed - can't find pics because I can't remember the name. ;>.> The important thing is that the biscuit must be green tea, not the filling. Or else it will probably not be green enough to be moss. Or you can make your own green tea biscuits and crush them.
    Chocolate mousse (eggless) - but not fatless! Ooh fat. I love fat.

    Chocolate Mousse Crafting Ingredients
    100g 70% cocoa chocolate
    200ml sweetened condensed milk
    300ml double cream <-- yes, fat, fat cream!
    Some dutch processed cocoa powder (non-dutch will work also)

    Chocolate Mousse Crafting Process

    1. Melt chocolate in microwave, or icky double boiler. Don't burn it. :P
    2. Add sweetened condensed milk to chocolate.
    3. Stir till it's more or less all the same
    4. Add cocoa powder.
    5. Stir some more, again until more or less all the same.
    6. Plop in all the double cream.
    7. Stir some more, again until more or less all the same. Zzzz.
    8. Beatbeat with hand mixer till stiff peaks. This happens FAST. Probably in a minute, tops.

    Tiny Fairy Garden Mousse Pot Assembly

    1. Plop chocolate mousse into ziplock bag.
    2. Cut off corner of bag.
    3. Pipe into cups.
      Stop at around 2/3 full. It will look like the cutest little turd. That is fine, because next we...
    4. Flatten the mousse so it doesn't look quite so turdlike.
      It doesn't have to be perfectly flat. Flat like churned, soft mud is fine. After all, no one is going to be able to see it.
    5. Dump carefully sprinkle crushed biscuit until you have an evenish layer.
      It's ok if you can still see a bit of mousse. Just not a lot of it.
    6. Bang each pot (carefully!) against your work surface a few times to settle everything.
    7. Sprinkle 100s & 1000s of fairies.
      Ok maybe a few less.
    8. Place icing sugar flowers.
    9. Refrigerate!
      Or eat. You can eat them at this point. Or take photos of them. Then eat them.

    Edible fairy garden! (aka rose, pistachio, peach, matcha, silver sugarballs dark chocolate truffle bar thing)

    Pristine Fairy Habitat

    This edible fairy garden (EAT ALL THE FAIRIES!) >.> uses exactly the same base as the Hazelnut pistachio strawberry osmanthus truffle bar things.

    Except that this time round, for pretties and flavourings we haz:
    - rose essence
    - vanilla essence
    - rose petals (from dried rosebuds for rose tea - some steamed to rehydrate them, some straight off the dry buds)
    - freeze-dried peach slice, chopped
    - silver sugar ball things (I think they're called 'dragees'. Or maybe 'fairies'. ~_o )
    - cheap matcha (nothing you'd want to make koicha, or even usucha with - good enough to cook is good enough)

    Am very pleased a nugget at how the blend of flavours turned out. If you like Turkish delight chocolates, this is just the thing, with the peaches adding interesting 'high' notes, and the pistachios adding nice texture. :X The matcha just adds fairy moss.

    Blurry Chunks of Sundered Fairy Habitat

    Alas, all my pics of the sliced squares turned out blurry. T_T That's what I get for taking pics after sundown!

    (If you're in Melbourne, don't bother with T2 matcha. It's bad. You're better off going to any random asian grocery and buying a 50g tin of matcha for $5~. Just make sure it's from Japan, and not a mainland chinese imitation. You'll be getting the same amount of quality, or lack thereof, for a tenth of the T2 price.)

    Hazelnut pistachio strawberry osmanthus truffle bar things

    Being the soul of restraint, it's SO unusual for me to go completely mad, and throw in the kitchen sink. Of course it is. Ahem.

    1) Hmm wanna make truffles but too lazy to roll balls. Okok let's make truffle bars.
    2) Drat, no Nutella, was planning to use that. Ooh but look, hazelnut essence. Ok!
    3) Pistachio looks so pretty in choccies, let's throw some in.
    4) Hey I have those freeze dried strawberries, and pink is pretty with green. Chop some of those and put them on top!
    5) Oo yellow is pretty with pink and I just happen to have dried osmanthus flowers...

    And so we have these Hazelnut pistachio strawberry osmanthus truffle bar things.

    They are amazing. I don't really like chocolate, I just love how it looks. But in the process of 'squaring' the bars, I've eaten more chocolate than I have in the past 6 months, lol!

    Best of all, they're super easy to make (well the base is), and you can throw as many 'pretties' as you like in / on top.

    Ingredients
    200ml sweetened condensed milk (aka 2 parts)
    200g good 70% cocoa dark chocolate (aka 2 parts) (broken into squares it comes in. I'm too lazy to do more than that.)
    25g~ honey
    25g~ butter (salted, unsalted, doesn't matter. I used salted cause lazy.)
    some vanilla essence
    some hazelnut essence
    some freeze-dried strawberries (chopped)
    some osmanthus flowers
    some pistachios (whole)

    Crafting
    1) Dump chocolate, honey, butter in a bowl.
    2) Shove bowl in microwave, melt until melted. Until the chocolate and stuff is melted. Not the bowl. If the bowl has melted, you've gone too far. Safest to stop when there are a few lumps of chocolate left, and finish it by stirring it all into a homogenous gloop.
    3) Throw in essences, stir stir stir till incorporated.
    4) Plop in condensed milk, stir stir stir till incorporated.
    5) Mix in pistachios .
    6) Pour into some kind of (parchment-paper-lined) pan, make pathetic attempt at forming some sort of 'slab'.
    7) Decorate with freeze-dried strawberry pieces and osmanthus flowers in a suitably 'artisanal' fashion.
    8) Tos...put gently in fridge (no need to cover unless your fridge has stinky things).
    9) Ignore for at least 4 hours.
    10) Remoof from fridge, cut into squares.
    11) Eat all the leavings that are ~_o 'unfit for presentation'.

    Notes
    If you want to mess with the ratio of condensed milk to chocolate, more milk will give you softer trufflepieces, more chocolate will give you harder ones (duh right). This ratio gives you pretty much perfect 'fancy truffle' texture. Not too squishy, not too hard, just right.

    Flourless peanut butter choc chip cookies from Kirbie's Cravings

    These flourless peanut butter chocolate chip cookies from Kirbie's Cravings are really quite nice! And very lazy. That's important. :X

    I don't care if stuff is flourless, eggless, butterless, whateverless one way or the other, but I do care if there is less stuff I have to do. ;)

    These are one-bowl, no creaming, no softening butter, etc. Basically just dump and stir. Perfect!

    I didn't change the recipe at all (unusual for me), though ofc I didn't really measure stuff, I just eyeballed it...

    Only things I did change were the baking times (and I think) the portion sizes.

    I tend to like my cookies to be 1 teaspoon or so, rather than the 1 tablespoon that a lot of recipes seem to like.

    I also reduced the baking time, because at 11m, the first batch was waaaaay overdone. Still edible, but with edges beginning to burn.

    I don't think it's a problem with the original recipe though, which is great.

    I think it may be that:
    - my new oven runs hot
    - I'm baking on parchment paper on a black cookie sheet
    - my cookies are smaller

    With those things in mind 8m 15s at 175C turned out perfect cookies for me! :) Yey!

    Also, if you tend to think more in ratios like me, the ingredient ratio is roughly:
    - 4 parts peanut butter
    - 4 parts dark brown sugar
    - 1 part egg
    - some choc chips
    - some baking powder

    Awesome flourless fudge cookies from ihearteating.

    From here:
    http://www.ihearteating.com/2012/06/03/flourless-fudge-cookies/

    Really nice cookies, and super lazy! Crispy on the outside, fudgy on the inside, and almost no work. :X

    I did change her recipe slightly, to make it less sweet. Plus I added orange essence. And less vanilla essence.

    My tweaked version

    • 2 c. powdered sugar
    • 3/4 c. unsweetened cocoa powder
    • 1/4 tsp. salt
    • 3 large egg whites
    • Some vanilla extract
    • Some orange essence
    • Some gold powdered sugar for sprinklies
    • Bake 7m 30s at just under 180C

    Technique-wise, it's exactly the same as what Kate posted! Yep, no need to beat those egg whites! WOOHOO! :X

    I'm not a big chocolate fan but I like these a lot. ^_^