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.
Well I’ve been making a lot of tasty treats but I haven’t had a lot of other fun projects to show off. It’s been busy over here though. In honor of the fact that I’ll be moving this weekend and this sweet coffee table that I made will be going into storage, I though it deserved it’s own post, even though this isn’t the best photo. I made this following (loosely) instructions from Readymade magazine, which I love. I found the reel to reel in the garage of the house I used to live in and it came along before the place was demolished. I’d like to get a glass top for this piece but that will have to wait for my next residence. Anyway I bought myself a drill to make this and I’m not sure how I lived without one before. Back to packing for me!
I realize August is not really the ideal time to be making scarves, but sometimes it’s just nice to not have to follow a pattern. I bought this yarn a little while ago from Knit Cafe in West Hollywood. It is a organic dyed cotton from blue sky alpacas and it is amazingly soft and easy to work with. I absolutely adore it and will definitely use it again despite it’s price. It was only $10 a skein but I have a habit of buying inexpensive yarn. I went with a simple moss stitch in alternating greens.
And because I cannot seem to stay out of the kitchen recently, I had quite a few different food experiments this weekend. Most of them, while edible, did not go as well as expected. In the end though, all my mistakes were completely overtaken by the fact that I made the best vegan pizza I’ve ever had. Now that is really saying a lot because I have a mild addiction to the pizza dough from Trader Joe’s and have made countless variations from tons of fake meat to vegetable overload to barbecue and most things in between. This pizza was a simple pesto, tomato and vegan mozzarella on wheat crust. I’m usually not a fan of the wheat crust as it tends to come out a bit dry, but all the oil in the pesto seemed to counteract that. This thing was definitely greasy, but well worth it. The cheese even melted! This alone would excite any vegan. In any case, I ate almost the whole thing. I attempted to make this last weekend but had a minor disaster with the pesto. The adapted version of the recipe is as follows.
Vegan pesto
1 bunch fresh basil (about 2 cups)
3/4 cup olive oil
1/2 cup pine nuts
1 tsp salt
1 1/4 tsp lemon
2 cloves chopped garlic
Throw it all in a food processor and blend.
