Category: cheesecake

Growing things

Posted by miss alix – 4 May ’09

I’ve devoted the past week to home renovation. This involves simple spring organization like cleaning out my closet as well as a lot of other projects that have been waiting for the right season. For one, I plastered and painted our bathroom which was quite an arduous task. Luckily, I was able to offset the toxic paint fumes and dust with a bit of time outdoors creating a balcony garden.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not at all gifted when it comes to growing things. The only plant that I’ve been able to keep alive thus far is a single stalk of lucky bamboo that has now traveled with me from my past four residences to my current place. On the other hand, I’m a firm believer that you can be good at pretty much anything if you practice, so I’m trying again and going all out with a very small vegetable and herb garden and a few succulents.

If all goes as planned, soon I will have heirloom tomatoes, strawberries and cayenne peppers grown fresh to add to dishes. I’m even more excited for the herbs as the basil was so fragrant, it took a great deal of willpower to not just eat it right then.

I came into possession of some recycled pots of various sizes and filled them with some succulents and small cacti. There are some really strange looking succulents, like the lithop, that are just so cool. I honestly don’t even know what some of the plants I got were, but they look awesome. Also, some of the pots were extremely small so the tiny cacti worked out perfectly. I’m also particularly fond of an adorable little cacti with a name something like Red-headed Irish that has a few little clovers on the bottom.

Just a few hours spent planting and we now have our own garden oasis. Here’s to hoping everything survives. I can’t wait for the time when we have some real space to plant things.

I’ve also discovered the joy of baking mini-cheesecakes. I have been putting off trying these because of a lack of options for vegan graham crackers to use in the crust. I finally settled on some to try and went with a basic cheesecake recipe. I topped it off with an attempt at a vegan lemon jello. Unfortunately, even though it tasted amazing, the jello didn’t solidify and it was really more of a lemon sauce.

Since the mini-cheesecakes are obviously much smaller than regular cheesecakes, I ended up only using half the recipe with another half left over to be made. I got a little experimental and made a spiced molassas cheesecakes which were yummy but didn’t quite cut it for my standards. In any case, I will definitely be making more mini-cheesecakes as they are the perfect size for a little treat. They can be fancied up for special occasions or just eaten as a sweet little finger food. I predict mini-cheesecakes are gonna be the next cupcake.

Happy Halloween!

Posted by miss alix – 31 Oct ’08

pumpkin cheesecake

As I’m sure I’ll be out gallivanting tomorrow evening, I thought I’d do my Halloween post tonight. I honestly can’t get enough of Halloween. I’m going to dress up as a bat tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll get some good photos to show you all since I made my costume, well some of it at least. I swear I do other things besides bake.

Above is the pumpkin cheesecake I made this week. It was good but it didn’t blow me away. Perhaps it was that I kept wanting it to be pumpkin pie and not cheesecake. I still have yet to find vegan graham crackers anywhere so I used a store bought crust. I guess it could have been more like cheesecake and that would have been better as well. Don’t get me wrong, it was good, I just wanted it to be even better.

Shawn and I carved pumpkins tonight. Since we bought them so late, they were only $5 for three good sized pumpkins. It’s been quite awhile since either of us carved any. I decided to go for something cute and carved a sugar glider in my pumpkin. Shawn made a traditional jack-o-lantern with big eyes that I love.

“bon bon” and “little ricky”

VeganMoFo has definitely inspired me to step up my blogging and has been very rewarding (although not always easy). I’ve had a total of 13 posts this month, which while not nearly every day is at least double the most posts I’ve ever made in a month.

Lemon is great for desserts

Posted by miss alix – 14 Jul ’08

I’ll be honest, I’ve never liked cheesecake. I only started eating cheesecake when I became vegan because it’s one of the most common vegan desserts around oddly enough. So I have grown to like it over the years, but quite often there is something a little off about vegan cheesecake. That is not to say I haven’t had a few that have been quite delicious. In any case, I decided to try my hand at it. I have to say the results were fantastic. I combined a couple recipes I found to come up with a lemon cheesecake that was light and fluffy with just a hint of lemon. I will admit that I used a store-bought crust. Next time I’ll try my own. 
I want to be posting a picture of the lemon bars I made this week but they were so good they were eaten immediately. So good. You would have no idea that they were vegan. This is not something I would usually say about my desserts since it makes vegan sound like a bad thing. In this instance though, the crust was just so flakey and the consistency of the lemon filling was just unlike anything I’ve had. Let me just say again…so good. It was possibly the best dessert I’ve made so far. 
Instead here is a simple chai tea cupcake. This batch came out okay, but I desperately need a new oven! I’m also not as big a fan of cupcakes that use soy yogurt in the recipe. Perhaps it was just the uneven baking of the cupcakes this time though.