Vegan French Yule Log

Hi All, It's Jane writing today's post....  As you might imagine, the first of the month is eagerly anticipated by the over 1,000 Daring Bakers.  It is the day that month's challenge is revealed.  So on December 1st I hurried to my computer and went immediately to the Daring Bakers message board to see what was in store for us this month.  My heart sank.  A Yule Log.  Now some of you might remember, last December was my first official DB challenge, and it was a Yule Log which turned out to be my first official challenge and my first DB failure.  So you can imagine I was not eagerly anticipating recreating that nightmare again.  But, this challenge was for a FRENCH Yule Log.  And, as I learned, that's a horse of a different color.  (Speaking of different colors, please excuse the photograph.  One of our young relatives, who shall remain nameless, decided to play with a paint program.  This is the only photo to survive, and it's been "cleaned up" a bit!)

Our hosts this month were Hilda of Saffron & Blueberry, and Marion of Il en faut peu pour etre heureux, and the opened with the reassuring comments of "don't panic," and "the recipe is 18 pages long."  Just what you want to hear when trying a new recipe for a cake you've had trouble with in the past!  So looking for reassurance, I went to visit the site where the original recipe lives... The recipe comes from Flore of Florilège Gourmand , but it's all in french and je ne parle pas de français!  (Perhaps, I should have paid attention in high school!)

But reading over the recipe, I thought to myself, I can do this.  And lo and behold, a yule log was born. While I can't say I'd make this recipe again, it wasn't bad.  But it was an awful lot of work for something that wasn't spectacular.  There were six elements:

1. Dacquoise Biscuit (Almond Cake) - I simply subbed the egg with Ener-G. It tasted good, but was slightly rubbery and didn't come off the silpat in one piece!
2. Dark Chocolate Mousse - I used my standard vegan mousse recipe.
3. Dark Chocolate Ganache Insert - Easy enough... just use vegan ingredients.
4. Praline Feuillete (Crisp) Insert - I used the coconut version and subbed dark chocolate for white.
5. Vanilla Crème Brulée Insert - I used the pastry cream recipe from The Joy of Vegan Baking.
6. Dark Chocolate Icing - I omitted the water and added a bit more chocolate so that it firmed up.

And of course, the assembly required refrigeration and some attention to detail.  Again, it was an edible dessert, and was even appreciated, but my Vegan Christmas Cookies were far superior!

Don't forget to check out the DB Blogroll to see what everyone else created this month!

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No need to read further...  This code allows me to be recognized by the Daring Baker tool that verifies whether or not we've participated in the challenge.

This month's challenge is brought to us by the adventurous Hilda from Saffron and Blueberry and Marion from Il en Faut Peu Pour Etre Heureux.
They have chosen a French Yule Log by Flore from Florilege Gourmand

Chocolate Soymilk Review

Jane and I thought it was time to do another side-by-side taste test of vegan chocolate milks.  Last year we settled on Silk's Light Chocolate Soymilk as our favorite, but things can change.  We found a soymilk in Target, Archer Farms Organic, and we also found some 8th Continent Light Soymilk which a number of you say you prefer.  So, we figured it was time to revisit the issue.  Without further ado, here are our findings:

Archer Farms Organic Chocolate Soymilk

Calories 130.  3 g fat.  5 g protein.

This was the only full fat chocolate soymilk we sampled.  Interestingly, it looked the "lightest" of the three.  It was paler in color and appeared more "watery."   It had a nice nose.  As for taste.  I enjoyed it very much.  Jane liked it too, but thought it had an aftertaste.  It placed second in our taste test today.

Silk Light Chocolate Soymilk

Calories 120.  1.5 g fat.  5 g protein.

Our personal favorite.  It still holds up as the winner.  The scent was more chocolate-y and the beverage itself has more body.  A very satisfying drink.

8th Contintent Light Chocolate Soymilk:

Calories 90.  1.5 g fat.  7 g protein.

Downright awful.  I thought it smelled like paint.  Jane, who typically has a better sense of smell than I do, thought it smelled like chocolate.  But we both agreed it was terrible.  It had a chalky aftertaste and the texture was also not as good as the others.  It was so bad we double-checked the expiration date to make sure it was still okay.  It was.

In the past we've also tried the Whole Foods store brand and didn't care for that either.  Hands down Silk Light Chocolate Soymilk is the way to go.

In honor of Chanukah, and the first day of winter, Jane made the matzoh ball soup recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance. This is the second time she's made this recipe. The first time, the matzoh balls disintegrated.  The recipe suggests refrigerating the matzoh ball mixture one hour to overnight.  We were both excited about the soup and so, after the hour was up, Jane made the balls and then the soup.  What we got was not-so ball soup, or rather a gelatinous mess at the bottom of the soup bowl.  That was very disheartening as we both loved matzoh ball soup in our pre-vegan life.  We'd been rather hopeful about this recipe since many people have expressed real enthusiasm over this recipe.

Fast forward to yesterday in the grocery store.  Jane grabbed a box of matzoh meal.  I asked what she was planning on making with it.  She replied, "I think it's time to try the matzoh ball soup again."  This time she used extra firm tofu and refrigerated the mixture over 24 hours.  (We decided the previous failure was due to the 1 hour refrigeration.)  As they were cooking the matzoh balls floated; they sank when we removed the lid from the stock pot... as expected.  But even though the matzoh balls held together, we were both unimpressed with the taste.

Over time, I've learned there are just some things you can't veganize.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining... perhaps that would have been a complaint last year when I was trying to acclimate to my new way of eating.  But over this last year and a half, Jane and I have discovered some really wonderful dishes we might never have tried otherwise.  I'm just not sure we'll be trying to veganize matzoh ball soup any time in the near future.

Anyway, we wish a happy Chanukah to all of our readers who are celebrating tonight.

Wintry Squash Soup

It's been unseasonably cold here in So Cal.  There's snow to 3,000 feet.  Which means, when the rains stop and the clouds clear, we'll see lots of snow on all the mountaintops around here.  I might actually know, visually, that it's winter here!

Tonight, we had the perfect winter fare, a hearty soup that Jane concocted, and brown bread from our old standby Moosewood Restaurant Low-Fat Favorites (veganized, of course).  The soup was so good and filling I almost didn't have room for my salad!

Anyway, here's Jane's recipe for Kabocha Squash Soup

• One Kabocha Squash
• 2 Acorn Squash
• 2 Tbs Olive Oil
• 1 medium sweet onion, diced
• 6 Cups vegetable broth
• salt to taste
• 3-4 vegan sausages cut into slices

1. Wash the squash.  Cut into quarters.  Remove seeds.  Then place on roasting pan (lined with Nonstick Silicone Baking Mat and place in 450°F oven for 30-45 minutes or until tender when pierced with a fork. Remove from oven and allow squash to cool to room temperature.
2. Once squash has cooled, scrape flesh from rind.  Add olive oil to stock pot.  When oil is heated through and bottom of pot coated, add onion and sautee until soft and just beginning to brown, 5-10 minutes.  Add squash to stock pot, and mash with potato masher. Slowly add vegetable stock, making sure to mix thoroughly. Heat through.
3. You can leave the soup "lumpy" which is more reminiscent of a stew to me. Or you can puree the soup with an Immersion Blender. (If you don't have one of these and you make soups, you should really consider getting one. It's so much easier than trying to divide the soup into batches and run it through the food processor!)
4. Follow the directions to prepare your sausage.  Once "cooked" (some products won't need to be cooked, they can simply be added directly to the soup), slice sausage.  Add to soup.  Heat through.

Jane used Field Roast Mexican Chipotle sausage.  Personally, I find them way too spicy, even added to this thick soup.  I think their smoked apple sage variety would work very well here.

As a follow up to my post, "Reason 812,417 To Go Vegan," here's a quote from one of my favorite resources... New Scientist Magazine.

So for the average American, buying local every day of the year would cut their carbon foot print by only around 4 per cent or 400 kg of CO₂eq per year. By comparison, shifting just one day a week from eating red meat and dairy to either chicken, fish, eggs or vegetables lowers your emissions by between 252 kg and 400 kg of CO₂eq.  ~  Source:  New Scientist - What is Your Dinner Doing to the Climate?

And if you're one of those people who's having trouble making the jump from vegetarian to vegan, here's an interesting tidbit...

333 grams of CO₂eq is emitted to make one hard-boiled egg. Compare that with a bowl of cereal with milk: 1224 grams of CO₂eq - equivalent to driving a typical SUV 6 km.  The main culprit in the bowl isn't the cereal, it's the milk. That's because the most emissions-intensive foods are red meat and dairy products. In general, red meat emits 2.5 times as much greenhouse gas as chicken or fish, since rearing cows and other livestock requires a lot of energy. It takes 2.3 kilograms of grain to make every kilo of chicken meat, 5.9 kg of grain for a kilo of pork, and 13 kg of grain plus 30 kg of forage for a kilo of beef. Worse still, they produce methane and their manure releases nitrous oxide.   ~  Source:  New Scientist - What is Your Dinner Doing to the Climate?

(Note: the science of calculating the carbon footprint of food items is not an exact science as it does not necessarily take into account the manner in which foods are produced regionally.  What's been used here is a specific formula not based on generalized data.)