I pre-ordered this book and completely forgot about it until I saw about the events for the release – so it was like a nice surprise! And I was definitely in for a treat.

The book itself is PERFECT. A beautiful eclectic mix of personal style, tips hints and tricks and the photographs are STUNNING! Unlike other books I’ve read, the ingredients are easy and accessible with the recipes clearly stated and easy to follow. As a bonus, there’s even and easy bake section! This book is one of the most amazing thing I have ever owned and will most definitely be a well used asset in my kitchen.

Now down to the cake! I chose to be ‘different’ (as per usual) and double a recipe to make it enough for a big cake. I went for the Bakewell Tart as they were my absolute favourite before I turned vegan almost two years ago (two years next month!) and I’ve been craving them for a long time. I followed the easy recipe (doubled) and sandwiched the layers together with raspberry jam and the ‘classic vanilla buttercream’ to which I added a few drops of almond essence.

I finished it of with a buttercream top, toasted flaked almonds and natural glacé cherries (watch out for ones with animal derived colouring – just one of her handy tips)… and voila! I have my very own amazing tasting and easy to make cake. I can’t wait to try more from this book, and I’m sure ill share with you my pictures! Thank you to all those who helped create this amazing book, it really is a vegans dream.

You can buy the book online here

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In other news, we hit 4 million hits on the blog yesterday! Awesome!

(Pic below: it was really cold and Rohan didn’t want to be half naked outside next to the rhubarb patch. This is his “please hurry up and take the damn photo” face):

Ingredients: 600 grams of rhubarb,1 1/4 cup sugar, 2 tbsp lemon zest, 1/4 tsp salt, 2 tbsp coconut milk, 3 tbsp corn starch dissolved in 3 tbsp cold water, 2 tbsp vegan marg.

Chop rhubarb into 1-inch pieces and place in a small saucepan with enough water to cover. Bring to a boil, then simmer for about 20 minutes until rhubarb is soft and you have a nice pinkish juice. Strain to remove the pulp and reserve the juice. (Add the pulp to crumbles, or soy yoghurt)

In a small saucepan over medium heat, combine 1 1/2 – 2 cups of juice (depending on how rhubarby you want it), sugar, lemon zest and salt, stirring well to dissolve the sugar. After the sugar is dissolved, add the corn starch mixture and the coconut milk, stirring well to combine. Stir constantly and cook for about 10 minutes until the mixture begins to thicken and bubbles appear on the surface.

Add the marg, and cook (stirring constantly) until the mixture thickens to a curd-like consistency. This took about 8 minutes for us.

Pour into sterilized jars to store. If you plan on using it all immediately for making a dessert, transfer into a heat-proof dish, cover and cool for 2 hours in the fridge before using.

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Ingredients for the tempura batter: 1 cup rice flour, 1 cup gluten-free beer (or cider or sparkling water), 1/2 tsp salt, paprika to taste, oil for deep-frying

Pick your dandelion flowers, wash and carefully pat dry. You want to keep the green base of the flower but make sure to remove any stalk.

Mix up your batter mix, it wants to be a relatively thick batter, but if its too thick add a bit more beer/cider/sparkling water. Heat the oil until bubbles form and a small drop of batter will cause the oil to get all excitable. Dip the dandelion flowers into the tempura mix, and drop carefully into the oil a couple at a time. Leave them in until they are done – ours took about 20 seconds. Scoop out with a slotted spoon and put on some kitchen towel to soak up any excess oil. Eat immediately as tempura has the tendency to get soggy if you leave it. Enjoy!

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In other news, our friend Ro has started an interesting facebook page: “The Vegan Psychologist”  which offers insights into  alternative/unorthodox psychology and animal rights. Check it out

Ingredients: 130g sweet potato (peeled before weighing), 120g rice flour (and a lot more for dusting etc), 1tsp xanthan gum, 1/2tsp baking powder, 60g vegan marg, 60g caster sugar, gluten-free jam

First peel and boil the sweet potato until soft, mash it thoroughly and leave it to cool in the fridge.
When it’s cooled for a while, you can start mixing the rice flour, xanthan gum, baking powder and caster sugar in a bowl, then rub the vegan marg into it with your fingers. When it’s starting to look a bit like bread crumbs, mix in the sweet potato mash with a spoon. This is when the extra flour comes in. You’ll probably need to add more flour bit-by-bit to get the dough to a workable consistency. It should be an interesting orange colour because of the sweet potato. When your dough is soft and not too sticky, put it in the fridge for half an hour or so.

Now you should be ready to make jam tarts! We had two different types, strawberry jam and lemon and lime marmalade. Not all jam is vegan and not all jam is gluten free so check your labels match up with your dietary requirements. Preheat the oven to 180°. Dust your rolling surface with yet more rice flour and roll the pastry dough to just under half a centimetre thick. Cut circles out with a cookie-cutter or the top of a glass and lay them in a greased bun tray. Put a teaspoon of jam in the middle of each (don’t overdo it – the jam will spread and boil over if there’s too much). Then just stick them in for about 8 minutes. Don’t expect them to brown like normal pastry – prod the pastry to see if it’s done, but be careful not to touch the boiling jam!

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Ingredients: 1 1/2 cups sugar, 1 bunch fresh thyme (plus sprigs for garnish), juice of 6 lemons, juice of 2 limes, 6 cups cold water, slices of lime to garnish.

In a saucepan, bring the sugar, thyme, and 1 cup water to a boil until the sugar is dissolved. Take off the heat and leave the thyme to infuse for a couple of minutes . Stir in the juices and 6 cups of cold water; strain into a large pitcher. Refrigerate until cold.

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Some of you might have seen the latest video from Dove doing the rounds. It features women who describe how they look to a professional forensic artist from behind a screen, who then draws them. The women then describe their fellow participants to the artist as he draws. Each woman then looks at the two sketches – one drawn from their own description of themselves, and one drawn from the perspective of a stranger. Each woman agrees that they look more beautiful when described by strangers than by themselves. Cue some general discussion about how beauty is important for happiness, how they are their own worst critics, and how everyone is more beautiful than they think they are.

I’d like to draw your attention to this  post by little drops, who provides an excellent critique of the video. Little drops first acknowledges the positives of the video, that it is useful in showing that sometimes we are our harshest critics. However, they go on to talk about how the video reinforces a narrow cultural perception of beauty by implying that descriptors such as “thin” are positive, and  freckles, fat, dark-skin, wrinkles are negative. The video specifically highlights white beauty standards, and people of colour are given minimal air-time. The video goes on to remind us how important it is to fit into standards of beauty, how it is essential for our happiness. Little drops talks about how they are angry at the ad for selling itself as challenging the idea that women’s self worth should be exclusively tied up with how they fit into a narrow beauty standard, but actually going on to reinforce those standards.

One of the things I find quite chilling about Dove’s latest video is that one participant says something along the lines of “I still have a long way to go in seeing myself as beautiful”. Whilst this is probably an accurate representation of how she feels, the position of that statement within an advert for Dove products sits with me really uneasily. It feeds into this whole “Love your body” rhetoric used by various advertising campaigns (see Dove’s real beauty campaign, Anne Summer’s “Love My Body”, The Body Shop, various other groups) which positions the blame for any self esteem problems on the individual for “not loving themselves enough” rather than the unrealistic representations and standards of beauty set by the media in service of selling more crap.

Sure, the message from companies like Dove and The Body Shop are marginally “better” in terms of body image issues, positioning themselves as radical alternatives to other cosmetic companies. However, its worth noting that these companies are part of a larger network of corporations who are guilty of the more problematic approach to advertising (The Body Shop is owned by Loreal, Dove by Unilever – hawkers of diet pills and Slimfast) and the “alternative” they offer is ultimately individualising; reinforcing of fucked up notions that a persons self-worth can be summed up by their attractiveness against a narrow sense of what is beautiful. This “love your body” rhetoric from big corporations isn’t the empowering message they position themselves as, just a niche in the market being filled. Empowerment cannot be found in a bottle of moisturizer.

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Rohan celebrated his birthday in style, by inviting a few of us along with his family to Yo Sushi! for a meal. The lovely folks at Yo Sushi! realised it was his birthday and invited Rohan, Jess, and Ruben (Rohan’s little brother) into the kitchens for a lesson on making cucumber maki from the head chef.

Above: Rohan, Ruben and Jess are being told the secrets of cucumber maki from the head chef. They gave us special chef hats!

Above: Ruben places a sheet of nori on a sushi rolling mat

Above: Jess placing the sushi rice onto the nori

Above: Rohan places a long strip of cucumber onto the rice

Above: Ruben rolling up the sushi

Above: our sushi, amongst some remnants of delicious Yo Sushi! food.

Cucumber maki recipe (makes 48 pieces) 

Ingredients: 4 sheets of nori (cut in half), 6 cups prepared sushi rice from this recipe, two cucumbers (cut into long sticks), sesame seeds

Equipment: sharp knife, bamboo sushi mat, gloves (preferable), cling film

Method:

Wrap your sushi mat in cling film, put on your gloves and oil them slightly so the rice doesn’t stick to your hands. If you don’t have any plastic gloves, keep a bowl of water near to rinse your hands in.

Put a half-size nori sheet on top of a bamboo mat. Spread about 3/4 cup of sushi rice on top of the nori evenly, leaving about 1 cm from the far edge. Sprinkle the rice surface with sesame seeds. Place cucumber sticks horizontally on the rice. Roll up the bamboo mat, pressing forward to shape the sushi into a cylinder, making sure you don’t wrap the bamboo mat into the sushi itself! Press the bamboo mat firmly with hands. Unwrap the bamboo mat and make more rolls.

Once all the rolls are done, cut each long roll into 6 pieces.  Enjoy with soy sauce, wasabi, and pickled ginger.

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Ingredients: I pack of asparagus (about 12 spears), half a cucumber, a handful of radishes, 1 tsp orange zest, handful chopped parsley, handful of smoked sun-blush tomatoes (use normal sunblushed or sundried if you don’t want to smoke them), 1 clove garlic (fine chopped), salt and pepper, 2-3 tsp tuscan kiss herb blend, 3 tbsp orange juice, 2 tbsp olive oil

Make ribbons out of the asparagus by shaving strips off down the entire length with a vegetable peeler and add to your mixing bowl. Thinly slice the cucumber and radish and add to the bowl alongside the garlic, herbs, and tomatoes. Combine the orange juice and olive oil, salt and pepper and toss through the salad. Delicious!

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Above: Jess, Hannah and Rohan looking after the Naked Vegan Cooking stall

Above: the Naked Vegan Cooking stall looking all neat before the masses arrive!

Above: Hannah and Jess rocking Naked Vegan Cooking aprons which Hannah made. Hannah is taking orders for these lovely aprons, contact nakedvegancooking [at] gmail [dot] com for more details if you want to buy one.

Above: Hannah gives us a thumbs up….

Above: The queue to get in the venue was snaking round the entire building all day. Didnt know there were so many vegans!

Above: we were flogging some of Raw Nibbles amazing gourmet raw chocolate bars. They are delicious!

We were also selling fantastic vegan baklava (below), smoked sun-dried tomatoes, chocolate cake, shortbread, spinach fatayers, zines… all the things!

Below: Heres a pick of Jess and Hannah with the fabulous Ms Cupcake of Britain’s Best Bakery fame!

Below: another pic from the Ms Cupcake stall. They were awesome.

Below: This is the lovely Zim from the Coffee Cranks Co-operative, a Manchester based bicycle-powered coffee shop who are currently raising money via crowdfunding to start up their amazing project. Big love to them!

Below: this fabulous looking shark was raising awareness for the Sea Shephard campaign which aims to use direct action to preserve biodiversity in global waters.

Other people that we want to big up who we didnt manage to get a photo of was Bleat (the upcoming vegan social networking site), Veggies (the awesome vegan catering company and radical workers coop), and the Manchester Hunt Sabs collective.

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Ingredients: 750g new potatoes (halve the big ones), 1 bunch of spring onions (chopped), 4 tbsp cider vinegar, 2 tbsp olive oil, half a bunch of dill (chopped), 1 tsp whole-grain mustard, 2 cloves garlic (minced), a few grinds of black pepper, 1 1/2 tsp of avanti anise fenugreek hemp salt blend (or alternatively, use 1/2 – 1 tsp of toasted fenugreek seeds and lots of freshly ground rock salt)

Method:

Boil or steam the new potatoes until done. Add the chopped dill and spring onions. Get a small jar and mix the cider vinegar, olive oil, whole-grain mustard and garlic together. Shake / mix up the jar and pour contents over the salad. Add the black pepper and fenugreek salt blend and mix thoroughly.

Leave for at least half an hour for the flavours to develop. Taste, and add more salt blend / pepper / dressing if desired.

Enjoy!

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