Savoury Pesto Tomato Muffins

I've been toying with the idea of doing a savoury vegan spelt muffin for a while now but couldn't find a recipe, so I decided to bite the bullet and make up my own. I'm pleased to say that they were a huge success - wheat-free and healthy yet bursting with flavour and texture.

Savoury Pesto Tomato Muffins

1 cup wholewheat spelt flour

1/2 cup cornmeal

1/2 cup almond meal

3/4 cup almond milk

pinch of salt & freshly ground black pepper

dried mixed herbs

pinch of onion powder

pinch of garlic granules

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

2 tbsp flax seed mixed with 3 tbsp water

3 tbsp chopped fresh basil

handful of chopped sundried tomatoes

handful of toasted pinenuts

handful of halved cherry tomatoes

Mix the spelt flour, cornmeal and almond meal in a bowl until well mixed. Add the salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic granules, baking powder and baking soda and combine. Add the flax mixture and almond milk and stir until a smooth batter is formed but don't overmix. Stir in the fresh basil, sundried tomatoes, pinenuts and cherry tomatoes, reserving a little of each to decorate. Pour a dollop of the mixture into muffin cases and top with a halved cherry tomato and a scattering of toasted pinenuts and basil leaves. Bake in a pre-heated oven for 20 minutes or until a skewer comes out clean. Bear in mind that the cherry tomatoes do make the muffins quite moist so the skewer might not come out totally clean even when the muffins are cooked.

Lemon and Blueberry Muffins

And so the obsession with vegan baking continues yet again. I whipped these up on Sunday morning and have to say they were my best batch yet. The recipe was adapted from my latest website discovery, The Daily Green but I wanted to keep it vegan and so substituted the egg for ground flax, a trick well learnt from the Post Punk Kitchen. Here is the original recipe.

Lemon and Blueberry Muffins
1 cup spelt flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
zest of one lemon
juice of 1/2 a lemon
1/2 cup applesauce
3 tbsps rapeseed oil
1/4 cup agave nectar
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 1/2 tbsps of ground flaxseeds mixed with 3 tablespoons water
handful of frozen blueberries

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl and slowly mix in the rapeseed oil, followed by the applesauce then the lemon juice and agave. Finish by adding the lemon zest, vanilla essence and frozen blueberries.

Place in a muffing tray and bake for around 20-25 minutes or until the muffins have risen, started to brown and a knife comes out clean through the middle.

Poppy Seed Oat Cakes and Beetroot Chutney

I'm staying off the sugar at the moment, so when Anjana and Nic came over on Monday, I decided to serve a cheese course and some fresh fruit rather than do a big dessert. Home made oat cakes are so easy to make and are delicious with some beetroot chutney and a slab of goat's cheese. I got the original recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the Guardian.

Poppy Seed Oat Cakes

1 cup of jumbo oats

1 cup of medium oatmeal

olive oil

boiling water

poppy seeds (optional, you can also use other seeds eg sunflower)

salt and pepper

Pre-heat the oven. In a large bowl, mix the jumbo oats and the oatmeal. Add any seeds you may be using (I sometimes add dried herbs here for extra flavour) and mix through. Season with several twists of black pepper. Form a well in the middle and add the olive oil. Afraid to say I never measure how much oil I am using and do it all on judgement alone. I would estimate a fifth of a cup. After this, add enough boiling water just for the ingredients to form a dough, not too sticky, not too dry. If you make it too dry, just add some more oatmeal. Work the ingredients into a ball and leave to stand for 10 minutes or so.

Roll the ball onto a floured surface and cut out the oatcakes using a cookie cutter. Once you have cut all that you can, place them onto a baking sheet lined with tin foil and bake for around 15-20 minutes or until starting to brown on the underneath. Flip them over and bake for another 5 mins or so. Turn out onto a cooling rack once done.

Beetroot Chutney

1 packet of pre-cooked beetroot

1 red onion

balsamic vinegar

red wine vinegar

agave nectar

chili flakes

Slice the onion and fry in olive oil in a saucepan. Cube the beetroot and add it to the pan once the onions are translucent. Cook for another couple of minutes before adding the balsamic and red wine vinegars. I add a good half a cupful of both, enough to cover the beets and onions with at least a centimetre extra. Add a good glug of agave to sweeten. Bring to the boil, reduce the heat and simmer until the liquids have reduced. Add a pinch of chili flakes for extra kick if you wish.

Cinnamon Walnut Raisin Loaf

The obsession with vegan baking continues (thanks in part to Fuss Free Flavours, one of my favourite food blogs). I had a not quite so successful run at muffins before the long weekend and was so disappointed with the results, I thought it was time to stop messing around making up vegan baking recipes myself and to start following what the experts do. Luckily, you can get no better expert in vegan baking than the excellent Isa at Post Punk Kitchen. I followed her recipe to the letter but substituted the sugar for a splash of agave and added in some chopped walnuts as I'd just been given some fresh from our friend's farm in the Lebanon.

Cinnamon Walnut Raisin Bread

1 1/2 cups spelt flour

1 cup of organic jumbo oats

1 1/2 teaspoons of gluten free baking powder

1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1 1/2 teaspoons of cinnamon

1/4 cup agave nectar

3/4 cup raisins (I used sultanas)

1/4 apple juice (I used Meridian Apple Concentrate diluted)

1 1/4 cup applesauce

1/4 rapeseed oil

2 tablespoons ground flax mixed with 6 tablespoons water

1/4 rice milk

Handful of walnuts crushed into small pieces.

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Soak the raisins in the apple juice. Mix the spelt flour, oats, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and cinnamon in a bowl. Add the agave, applesauce, oil, flax mixture and rice milk and mix with the dry ingredients until combined well. Add raisins and apple juice. Add the walnut pieces and mix well. Pour into a pre-oiled baking tin and bake for around 50-60 minutes or until the top is crusty and a skewer comes out cleanly.

This was such a quick and easy loaf to make, it looked fantastic and it made the house smell divine. I'm rather inclined to agree with Isa that with vegan baking, you are "creating edible art, making your house a home and solving world peace all at once". I may even try this in muffin tins next time. It's a dense loaf although perfectly moist but works well cut thickly, toasted and spread with leftover applesauce.

I found Isa's guide to vegan baking incredibly helpful and it helped me to realise where I was going wrong before (not enough egg substitute) and I can't wait to try more techniques. This obsession looks like it could run and run.....

Vegan Spelt Blueberry Muffins

The obsession with baking continues - quite a departure from how I usually cook but it is becoming quite addictive. I baked these beauties on Sunday morning before yoga and the boy munched them practically straight from the oven. I wanted to do something with the spelt flour I had from the pizza bases but also to do something vegan. I couldn't find an exact recipe to follow so I basically made something up using the excellent Veginity as inspiration but also combined with a few ideas from the huge amount of muffin recipes on offer from Fat Free. I didn't really fancy using an egg replacer as it somehow seemed too artificial, so I got moisture from homemade apple sauce instead. Overall, I was pretty pleased with the results and have been enjoying these for breakfast a few days this week.

Vegan Spelt Blueberry Muffins

One cup Spelt Flour

Half cup oat bran

1 Dessert spoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon of vanilla essence

1/2 cup of blueberries

1/2 cup applesauce (I stewed 2 peeled apples in some water and honey, drained and pureed it)

1/3 cup agave nectar

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl, then stir in the wet ingredients. Once the consistency feels right, pour into muffin cups in a muffin baking tray and bake for 25 mins at around 180 degrees or until a skewer comes out clean if poked into the muffins.

The Great Vegan Spelt Pizza Base Experiment

I have been inspired to write my own blog after having read some of the many excellent food blogs out there (What the Hell Does a Vegan Eat Anyway?, Fuss Free Flavours and 101 Cookbooks are three of my favourites which spring immediately to mind). The internet is a fantastic resource for those with even the smallest amount of interest in cooking and there are a wealth of recipes, blogs and databases online to suit all tastes. I am often to be found searching for healthy recipes which suit the way I want to cook and eat. In the course of my research, I kept stumbling across pizza base recipes - I wouldn't usually do much baking since you have to include yeast and flour (too processed for my liking and I don't always take well to yeast) but I kept having pizza base fantasies and wanted to try some cooking with spelt flour, as I'd read that this ancient grain was often more easily tolerated than wheat.

Even more exciting than using my Doves Farm Organic Wholegrain Spelt Flour was using the dough hook on my food processor for the first time! Ah it's the little things. I made two batches of dough, large enough to fit a pizza tray, baked the first and kept the second in the fridge for a week. The recipe was roughly as follows:

Spelt Vegan Pizza Base

3 1/2 cups of spelt flour

1 tsp salt

1 tbsp yeast

1 1/2 to 2 cups water

extra virgin organic olive oil

And I took my inspiration from this recipe and also from here - I'm not a great one for following recipes to the letter, so I'd recommend just giving it a go and seeing how it feels. I definitely think one week in the fridge was a bit too long as the second dough was a lot stickier than the first. I didn't use a pizza stone but did use a pizza baking tray (with holes). I made half of each pizza vegan (as I don't believe in mixing carbohydrates eg flour with animal protein). Mark doesn't believe in this however and just loves cheese, so I whacked a load of mozzarella on his half. I was a bit scared to put too many toppings on the first pizza as I'd read not to overload it, but found that the spelt is pretty sturdy and is actually quite bready, so I really went for it on the second one (top picture).

Fillings that worked the best were sundried tomatoes, grilled yellow peppers, griddled courgette strips, mushrooms, artichokes, olives and fresh basil. I made my tomato sauce simply by roasting some cherry plum tomatoes in the oven with some olive oil and garlic cloves, then pureeing it with my hand blender (absolute favourite piece of kitchen equipment) with some dried Italian herbs and fresh basil.

On balance, the pizzas were great but it needs some more practice before it gets perfect. I think I used a little too much yeast and actually put some sugar in mine which I wouldn't use again. I would also try to make only one batch at a time, as keeping it in the fridge seemed to make it really sticky.

Either way, the pizzas were great to take to work for lunch - filling, wholesome and incredibly tasty. Definitely a success.