Cranberry Banana Bread

Cranberry Banana Bread

I purchased more walnuts, pecans and cranberries than I needed for my Christmas baking, so I decided today that I would do a bit of baking to use them up.

I made two loaves of this bread, one with walnuts and the other with pecans.  We will keep one of the loaves for ourselves and take the other to my Dad's house tomorrow for my son's family  birthday celebration.

The first thing you need to do is pre-heat your oven to 350 degrees.   My oven is really slow to heat up, so I can have a cup of tea while I am waiting for it to get up to the required temp.  It doesn't take long to mix this bread, so you will want to wait until the oven is ready.


In a large mixing bowl, place 1 and  2/3 of a cup of flour.  You can combine all-purpose flour with whole wheat flour if you like.  This is a forgiving recipe.

Add 1/2 teaspoon baking soda and 1 teaspoon baking powder

Then add 1 teaspoon of cinnamon, 1/2 teaspoon of ground nutmeg and 1/2 teaspoon of ground ginger.   Add 1/2 teaspoon of salt.

Then add 1/2 cup of vegan-friendly granulated sugar.

Add 1/2 cup of chopped dried cranberries, or 1/2 cup of chopped fresh cranberries if you like a loaf that has tart bits in it.

Finally, add 1/2 cup of chopped nuts.  I put walnuts in one loaf and pecans in the other.

Stir your dry ingredients together.

In another large mixing bowl, mash three ripe bananas.  You need about 1 1/4 cups of banana, and I have found that three bananas is the right amount for that.

Add 1/2 of unsweetened apple sauce - this is the egg substitute.
OR
Use a homemade or commercial egg replacer such as Ener-G - this is what I do now!

And 3 tablespoon of canola oil.

Mix these wet ingredients together well.

Other tasty additions to his batter could be raisins, or currants or coconut, candied citrus peel - the list is endless, really.

Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and stir until well combined, and until there are no pockets of dry ingredients lurking in the mixture.

You can use a stand mixer or a hand mixer for this, but I stirred by hand.   It will seem like a dry-ish batter for a little while, but it does come together nicely after some stirring.

Prepare a loaf pan in your usual way - I used canola oil in a mister to spray my pans.

Carefully spoon the batter into your loaf pan, and place it on the middle shelf of the oven.  Oven temperatures can vary greatly I have found.   The loaf takes anywhere from 45 minutes to
1 hour to cook.   I set my timer for 50 minutes and do the first doneness check at that time, and if it needs more time I check at 5 minute intervals.

Your loaf is done when a toothpick inserted in the centre comes out clean and dry.

Allow your loaf to cool in the pan on a wire rack for about ten minutes, then carefully slide it out of the pan to continue cooling on the wire rack.   When the loaf is perfectly cool, you can wrap it in waxed paper.  It will keep nicely, if wrapped,  for a few days.  That's the theory.   In practice, the loaf is unlikely to last that long because it will be eaten within hours, if not minutes!

Sausage Rolls

This is an update of a post that I originally made in September.  I am updating it because I can now add photos (which I could not do on the day of the original post) and also, I have found a vegan puff pastry that is pre-rolled, which is a collossal time-saver.

Imagine my delight when I discovered that tenderflake makes vegan puff pastry. I can buy it in my local Loblaws. I use it for making crusts on fruit pies and on savoury casseroles.

One of my favourite uses for puff pastry is for making sausage rolls. My Mum used to make them when I was young, and they were something I missed when I became a vegetarian and then a vegan.

With this puff pastry, I am happy to say I am again enjoying sausage rolls. Even if pre-rolled puff pastry is unavailable I have a good rolling pin and pretty good rolling technique so I don't mind rolling it out myself.

These little gems make a great appetizer but they can also be part of a dinner along with a nice savoury vegetable. I also like them cold the next day for lunch!

 Sausage rolls

Pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees

1 package vegan puff pastry (either pre-rolled, or roll-your-own!)

1 package of the vegan sausages of your choice - I use Field Roast Apple Sage sausages - they're fantastic.

finally, you will need some dijon mustard

Directions

 1. Thaw your puff pastry for at least eight hours in the fridge, or overnight in the fridge

 2. Thaw the sausages until they can be handled without freezing your hands off, then take them out of the plastic sheath that they come packed in.

 3. Gently cook the sausages in a frying pan or in the oven until they are about half done, then set them aside to cool.

 4. Sprinkle some flour on your rolling surface and place one block of the puff pastry on the surface and roll out the dough until it is about 12 inches square, or unwrap your pre-rolled puff pastry and unroll it on your work surface.  I use a silicon rolling mat to work on.  It's very handy, cleans easily, and is a good size.



 5. Place two sausages at the far side of your square of rolled-out dough.

 6. Spread a line of the mustard along the top side of the sausages, then roll the sausages and the dough towards you. Make sure you roll the sausages so that the dough goes around them at least one and half times.

7. Cut the roll of sausage and dough into one inch pieces and place on a parchment covered cookie sheet.

 8. Lightly brush the tops of the sausage rolls with soy milk or other non-dairy milk. This will help the sausage rolls develop a nice brown top.

 9. Repeat with the other two sausages.

 10. Cook for about 18 minutes but check for brown-ness at the 15 minute mark.

Jam Thumb-Print Cookies

These are another of the cookies that my Mum used to make at Christmas, and they are a family favourite! The duty of making them now falls to my sister Leslie, who has veganized the recipe so that everyone in our family may enjoy these wonderful little gems.  Leslie really should operate a vegan bakery - her cakes are wonderful, and are all of her own invention, and her cookies are fantastic.

This is a fairly labour intensive cookie - you can't just drop these guys onto a cookie sheet!

You will need to do a bit of prep before you begin - you will need to grind up enough walnuts to give you between 3/4 of a Cup and 1 Cup of finely ground walnuts.   Unless you are a whizz with a knife, you will want to use a food processor to do this job.

You will also need to prepare about a 1/2 cup of flax seed meal with a cup of warm water,  and mix it  well, and allow it to stand for at least 30 minutes.  An hour is better.  As it stands, it will thicken nicely, and can then be substituted for the eggs that would normally be put in the recipe.

Pre-heat your oven to 375 degrees.

To make the cookies, mix together thoroughly:
1/2 Cup of Earth Balance buttery sticks
1/4 Cup of packed brown sugar
1 tablespoon of the prepared flax/water mixture (see above)
1/2 teaspoon of Vanilla

In another bowl, sift together
1 cup of flour
1/4 teaspoon of salt

Pour the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients and mix well.

Roll the dough into balls that are just slightly less than 1" in diameter.

Dip each ball into the remaining flax/water mixture, and then roll in the finely chopped nuts.

Place each nut-covered ball about 1 inch apart on an ungreased or parchment covered cookie sheet, and bake for five minutes.

Remove the cookie sheet from the oven, and with your thumb or another finger, gently press into the top of each cookie.

Return the cookies to the oven and bake for another 8 minutes longer.

Allow the cookies to cool, and then spoon some raspberry jam into the indentation in each cookie.

This recipe makes about 2 dozen cookies.  They fly off the cookie tray like they had their own little wings, so you might want to make a double batch.

Variations:  instead of chopped walnuts you could roll the cookie dough in finely chopped pecans or almonds, or in coconut.

No Butter Butter Tarts

As part of my Christmas baking I made butter tarts.  My tarts are vegan, so they contained no butter, but if I do say so, they were fantastic.   Again, I was using my mother's recipe, but I omitted the butter and the eggs.

Butter tarts are a uniquely Canadian pastry - this is something that I did not know until recently.  It is also something that I find a bit surprising, considering that Americans have pecan pie, which to me always seemed like a gigantic butter tart.

I was reading an article in a Toronto newspaper this summer that mentioned that bus tour companies have started offering butter tart tours though small towns in Ontario, each town claiming to have the best butter tarts in the province.  Contests have been held to determine the best butter tarts in the province.   Some people like their butter tarts to be runny, some like raisins but no nuts in their tarts, some like nuts but no raisins, some prefer tarts with neither raisins nor nuts.  My tarts are not runny, and they have both raisins and nuts in them.   They are excellent tarts.

You will need about 24 tart shells.  You can make the pastry yourself and then roll it, cut it and put it in a tart tin (like a muffin tin, only shallower), or you can buy pre-made tart shells and use them.   There are many vegan brands of  tart shells available in supermarkets today, and most of them are quite good.  I used a house brand from my local Loblaws store.

Start by pre-heating your oven to 400 degrees.   Prepare your tart shells by separating them, and placing them on a parchment paper-lined cookie sheet.   The parchment paper will protect your cookie sheet from spills when you are filling the tart shells, and from boil-overs when the tarts are in the oven.

Place a half a teaspoon of chopped walnuts or pecans in each tart shell.  Follow that with a half a teaspoon of raisins in each tart shell.

In a large mixing bowl, combine 1 cup of packed brown sugar,

1/2 cup of melted Earth Balance margarine,

1/2 cup of corn syrup  or Lyle's golden syrup (I use Lyle's golden syrup, which is not made with corn),

1 teaspoon of vanilla,

and one tablespoon of white vinegar.

Add the equivalent of two egg's worth of vegan egg replacer.  I used Ener-G egg replacer.

Stir the ingredients until they are well mixed.  In the traditional butter tart recipe, eggs are used to bind and thicken the mixture, so that after cooking, the tart contents hold together.  I could detect no difference between these tarts and the kind my mother used to make with eggs and butter.

Spoon the mixture into each tart shell - you will need slightly more than a tablespoon in each tart shell.  If you put too much of the mixture in each shell, the mixture will spill over in the oven and this makes the tarts next to impossible to get out of the tart shells in one piece.



Place the tarts on a rack in the middle of the oven and bake for 10 to 12 minutes.   Check your tart shells for doneness at about the eight or nine minute mark.  The filling will be bubbling and hot when you take the tarts out of the oven, but will settle down once the tarts cool.

Date Squares

Date Squares

Date squares were always my favourite Christmas treat when I was a child.   My Mum had a recipe that she had tweaked and perfected and it was part of a cook book that she gave to my sisters and me many years ago.   These date squares take me right back to my childhood and all the wonderful Christmas memories of that time.

My sisters and I divide up the Christmas baking between us, and I always opt to make the date squares and the butter tarts.   It is a joy to make them.

I left my Christmas baking a little late this year to minimize the temptation factor - it didn't work.  The only way for me to remove the temptation is to not make them at all.

So here is my Mum's recipe:

Pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees.  Grease and flour a 9" x 13" pan.


The date filling

You will need three cups of chopped dates.  You can use medjool dates in a tub, or you can use a block of pressed dates, which is what I used.  Whole dates are great for stuffing with almonds or turning into date caramel, but considering that these dates are going to be cooked and turned into a paste, the block of dates is a fine option.

Place the dates in a saucepan along with one and a half cups of water and a quarter cup of sugar.

Cook over a low heat, stirring frequently until the dates are soft and the water is all absorbed.  There should be no hard bits of date left at this point.  Set the dates aside to cool.

In the meantime, as the dates are cooking (and you are keeping an eye on them!), mix three quarters of a cup of vegan margarine ( I used Earth Balance Buttery Sticks) with one cup of packed brown sugar.

When this is all mixed, add one and three quarters cup of flour, one quarter of a teaspoon of baking soda and a half of a teaspoon of salt.  Mix until this is all combined well with the butter and sugar mixture.  You will have to scrape down the sides of your mixing bowl a few times.

Now add one and a half cups of rolled oats to the flour mixture and mix them in.

Scoop slightly more than half of your flour and oats mixture into the bottom of your prepared pan, and press the mixture firmly into the pan.  You want the bottom layer to be firm so that it will hold up to being sliced and handled.

Spoon your cooled date mixture down the middle of the pan and use the back of a spoon to spread it evenly from side to side in the pan.

Evenly sprinkle the remainder of the flour and oats mixture onto the top of the dates.   Gently press down so that the topping is pressed into the oats just a bit.

Place your pan into the oven and cook for 22 to 30 minutes, until the top layer is golden brown.
In my oven, I find that the lower end of this time range is best.  Of course, every oven is different so you will want to keep your eye on your date squares if this is the first time you make them.

These treats are lovely with tea or with hot chocolate!