Guilt-free Goodies

I've been trying my hand at vegan baking lately. I'm interested in recipes that are vegan from the get-go, not simply modified traditional recipes that substitute Earth Balance for butter and egg replacer for the real thing. Sunday I made Chocolate Peanut Butter Pillows from the folks at the Post Punk Kitchen.

They were fun to make, and I was fairly pleased with the results. I would have liked the chocolate bit to be more chocolate-y, but I didn't have any black cocoa, and had used regular cocoa powder + extra baking soda in place of the recipe's Dutch processed cocoa. So that is probably my fault. This recipe, btw, is from the book Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar.

Monday I moved on to banana bread from The Eazy Vegan. I modified it somewhat, adding shredded coconut, chocolate chips, and pecans.

I'd been disappointed with previous attempts at vegan banana bread, which seems like it ought to be very vegan-friendly, because the results were too dense. I'm quite pleased with this recipe and will try it again.

A couple of comments on the vegan baking experience. Recipes often call for vegan sugar, which initially sounded strange to me, leading me to investigate. I learned that half of the sugar sold in the US comes from sugar cane, the rest from sugar beets. Products derived from sugar beets are vegan, but when you look at cane sugar, things get murky. Charcoal is used in the final filtering process, and that may come from animal, vegetable or mineral sources. Over half of the cane refineries in the US use bone char-- animal derived charcoal-- in the filtering process. Yuck.

And finally, it's a genuine pleasure to once again being able to lick the spoon/bowl/etc. without fear of salmonella.