Merry Christmas

For vegan cake at Christmas, I whipped up my first batch of VCTOTW Gingerbread Cupcakes with vanilla icing. I loved the chopped pieces of ginger in the cake (even though, or maybe because, I didn't chop them up especially finely...)





The part I really wish I could take credit for: the vegan lunch offerings included two salads, corn and broccoli fritters in chickpea flour batter. And Mum's always-fantastic panforte, which she veganised from a recipe a few years ago.



So anyway, Merry Christmas!

I don't know how to respond to this...

Due to some upsetting news in the very extended family (things are looking better now), I didn't attend the vegan Christmas lunch today to which I'd been invited. Funnily enough, I saw this on the PostSecret MySpace blog this evening.


Real nice. My non-vegan friends and family have never made me feel like a nuisance at all, but I guess that makes me one of the very lucky vegans.

December Potluck

Another potluck picnic, this time in the Royal Botanic Gardens. A small gathering, but with just the right amount of delicious vegan food for the five of us: salads, Moroccan lentil balls, passionfruit melting moments, Vege Chips and some more Ritter Sport that, er, we didn't get around to eating. In the foreground is my offering: avocados, cherry tomatoes, salad leaves, pistachios, mung beans and cucumber, with a dressing of lime pressed olive oil and some fresh lime juice. The others were couscous with vegetables, and quinoa-vegetable with a tamari-based dressing.

Round. Useless. Tasty.

I've had a couple of blocks of peppermint-dark chocolate Ritter Sport in the house lately; it's one of the vegan varieties they make, but it's not imported into Australia — unlike the marzipan in dark chocolate, which I also recommend.

These blocks came from South Africa, which begs the question: Are we the only damn country to have Ritter Sport but not the peppermint?! Anyway, moving on before I sound completely whiny — behold:



Pebermynte. And in South Africa this stuff is not Quadratisch. Praktisch. Gut. but Quality. Chocolate. Squared. Fair enough — that's partly a translation of the secondary Qualität im Quadrat motto.

Off with my word-nerd hat and on with the vegan baker's hat. Chocolate and peppermint are also a winning combination in cupcake form:



It's the old reliable VCTOTW chocolate (with slightly less sugar, to counter the sweetness of the icing), peppermint icing, and melted-down Scarborough Fair 70% cocoa chocolate... (Objects in photo may appear less glossy once they cool to room temperature and solidify.)

Thinking of Scarborough Fair — an awesome New Zealand company selling fairly traded, and not overly expensive, coffee, tea and chocolate — had me finally wondering, for the first time, about the fair trade credentials of Ritter Sport. Well, they're not certified, but I was pleased to read about this project, called CACAONICA.