Vegan baking and desserts
My
favourite "secret weapons" for corrupting unsuspecting friends
and relatives into the ways of veganism have got to be chocolate
cake, cheesecake and chocolate chip
cookies. The great thing is, apart from being delicious and easy
to make, my favourite baking recipes taste completely normal. By this
I mean that non-vegans often expect vegan cake to taste "weird",
so when I feed it to other people no-one ever notices it's vegan and are
always pleasantly surprised when (if) I tell them afterwards. Delicious
cake or cookies have got to be the best way to make a good first impression
of the vegan lifestyle - anyone who thinks vegan eating is about deprivation
is so wrong...
Another advantage is you don't have to buy a whole box of eggs just to use one of them in a cake and end up throwing the others away (well, that's what always happened to me when I used to use eggs). And you can eat the remains of the raw mixture risk-free :-).
A note about timings and temperatures: the timings for these recipes are what works in my oven, which is a fan oven, so you may find you need to increase either the temperature or the cooking time slightly depending on what type of oven you have.
My top three world-corrupting recipes
Cheesecake
Chocolate cake
Chocolate chip cookies
More vegan desserts
Nectarine and marzipan slice
Really easy vegan pancakes
Scotch pancakes
Recommended vegan baking recipe books
One of my favourite books for baking recipes is Vegan with a Vengeance - there's some really good stuff in there, with lots of original ideas and combinations of ingredients. My favourites so far are the Raspberry Blackout Cake (chocolate cake with raspberry jam in the mixture as well as raspberry jam and chocolate icing in the middle and on the top of the cake) and the Ginger Cookies.
Also by the same authors is Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World, which is worth obtaining just to look at the pictures... I've only just started on this one but the Basic Chocolate Cupcake recipe has already impressed many of my friends. The recipe is also featured in the Vegan Society's recipe leaflet.
One of my new favourite baking recipes is the lemon cranberry muffins from the new recipe book 'VeganYumYum' by Lauren Ulm. They've got almond essence in too, which is great for marzipan fans :-).