WWPDD?

That is, What Would Paula Deen do?

I've never been the biggest fan of Paula's food, if only because her food hinges on the fact that it's your down-home Southern cookin' with no g. And cookin' includes copious amounts of butter, eggs, lard, cheese, cream, and anything else that's probably terrible for you, obviously not vegan/vegetarian, and delicious enough that suddenly selling your soul for that last piece of pie doesn't seem like such a horrible trade off. To whit, my grandfather is convinced Paula Deen is trying to personally kill him in a slow, methodical manner with her delicious down home cookin'. This might be true for all of us, but at least the road to our deaths will be littered with apple fritters, cheesy casseroles, and deep-fried everything you could ever want! Woooo!

Gingerbread Apple Crumb Topping Pie

When I think of fall, I think of the following things in the following order:
1. That weird fall smell that's very distinct but that you can't really describe, but I know you totally know what I'm talking about
2. Pies both apple and pumpkin
3. Time to bust out my scarves again, yay!
4. Leaf piles
5. It's finally seasonally appropriate to have hot soups again, yay!

Today's blog post will focus on the second thought, surprisingly enough. I know you're just having a heart attack with surprise right now that I'm going to talk about pie today, because I totally never ever talk about it.

This? Never.

C. Stout Cupcakes

My good friend Caiti's birthday came to pass, and I love when my vegan friends have birthdays. It's a great excuse to use them as guinea pigs for my vegan baked goods.
I asked Caiti what she wanted for her birthday, and she was infuriatingly vague. Whatever you want, she said. I know you'll figure something out, she said. No coconut, she said. So I figured I'd find something in my vegan cupcake book that I hadn't tried before. I absolutely knew it was fate when yesterday, flipping through my recipe book, I came across Chocolate Stout cupcakes. Caiti's last name is Stout. FATE. C. Stout cupcakes it was, and boy howdy it was a good choice.

Strawberry-Rosewater Cobbler with Lemon Poppyseed Pastry

Well, goodbye summer, amiright? You know it's fall when it's fifteen degrees cooler in the shade than the sun and it smells like bonfires. I love the fall. There is something really kind of alluring about it. I don't think any other change is seasons is as electric, it's like you can feel it inherently in your bones. Yeah, when spring comes around it's totally great, but it's a slog and it's always so muddy and slippery and dreary till May or so...and once it gets nice it's practically already summer anyway. But fall lends such a drastic and exciting change, so much more than any other time of year.
Okay. Now that I've waxed poetic about fall, I'm going to write about my favorite summertime dessert, something I like to trot out once or twice a year, mostly because it is my favoritest dessert ever in the history of everness: strawberry rosewater cobbler.

Strawberry-Mango Pie

Do you see that there? The above picture? What does that look like to you? Delicious, perfect, awesome pie, right? Now scroll down a few entries and take a look at that failurepie. This, my friends, is why you don't try to help your sexy awesome ex-girlfriend (who has great hair, by the way, just throwing that out there) do a basketweave pie crust and claim to know what you're doing. Because you don't, because LOOK AT THAT UP THERE. Just LOOK at how AMAZING that basketweave looks. That is how it is done, my friends. That pie is a thing of beauty and grace that could have only been crafted by the hands of an angel such as myself. I mean --

Does that basketweave not bring a tear to your eye? Does it not want to make you weep like a little schoolgirl with pigtails and a pink backpack? I'm thinking it does, so don't lie.

Kalamata Olive Bread

Oh man, people. I try not to brag about myself, but I am pretty much on my way to becoming the champion of bread baking. All I need now is several training montages. They shall consist of me kneading, waiting for the dough to rise, and eating the shit out of the finished product.
But seriously, folks, I've baked some awful bread in my day, and I it could very well be something in the air ducts, but bread baking feels pretty much like magic for me now. The yeast comes to life just for me; it says, "Dorie, for you, we will make your bread dough ginormous". If only bread baking weren't such a labor-intensive and time-consuming process, I'd be making it every day.
"But Dorie," you, the hypothetical reader asks, "why don't you just get a bread machine? You can make the dough and leave it for six hours, and then, boom, fresh bread."
Well, hypothetical reader, that is a good question. The answer is twofold: one, I am too poor to afford your fancy-pants kitchen equipment when I have two hands and a table and way more free time than I deserve. Two, how dare you. Can a bread machine knead with the kind of love that I knead my dough with? It can't? Well, then, sir, I rest my case. Enjoy your soulless machine bread, you communist.

Vegan Caramel-Apple Pie with Gingerbread Crust

There is something about my pies that I need to work the kinks out of, so to speak. My pie crusts have often not held up like a proper pie. A proper slice holds its own, not collapsing in on itself when you're trying to take a particularly attractive picture of it, right? I need to work on that. My pies taste good, but they don't look good, and if I want people to eventually buy this stuff, I need to tweak the recipes so that these pies look as good as they taste.
My pie just doesn't hold its own. I tried to pretend it was cobbler (shhh! don't tell it's really just attractiveness-impaired pie). I also had someone assisting with this pie who wanted to show me that he could make a basketweave pie crust top. Whether or not he succeeded is up to you to decide.
Also, I need to replace some light bulbs in the kitchen. It is not doing these pictures of my pie slash cobbler any favors.
But anyway...on to the actual pie.

Red Velvet Cupcakes

To be honest with you, I have never tasted a red velvet cupcake. I know in some states that would be grounds for divorce. Ha. But if I have had a red velvet cupcake in the past, I've forgotten about it, so obviously the experience was not memorable enough. Like Kenny Powers says, I've had a lot of memories in my life, and sometimes the smaller ones get dumped to make room for the bigger ones.
I guess I would say, consider me full of regret for missing out on years of stuffing my piehole with these babies. I keep changing my mind about what flavor of cupcakes are my favorite, and this one is quite the contender. It has a flavor that is hard to explain. They're like half chocolate, half vanilla, and all deliciousness.

 

(The cupcake undressing so you could see the red cake underneath. Pervert.)

I was going to get around to making these later anyway, but I decided to make them for a friend who recently went vegan. When I asked what was the hardest thing for her to give up, she said that sometimes her workplace would bring in a steaming batch of red velvet cupcakes, and while most of the time non-vegan treats didn't do much for her, those cupcakes had her seriously considering a relapse. Well, no more, dear friend. We whipped these up and after our first ones apiece we had a conversation that went like this:

PBCC (Peanut Butter Chocolate Chocolate) Cupcakes

Okay, so I know it's been a few(ish) weeks. The thing is, I'm actually terrible at keeping up with blogs. But this is one I'm really passionate about, so I am going to try from now on to keep up with it a little bit better. My apologies.
Now the truth is that my last recipe was a bust: the lemon cupcakes with raspberry filling, that is. I was totally going to post an entry about them anyway, going over why they failed and what I am going to do differently next time. However, my roommate, who has been my photographer so far, deleted the pictures of the failurecakes, thinking I didn't want them (then having a good laugh at my expense over this exchange: "Why do you need the pictures? I thought you didn't like those cupcakes..." "Well, I still need to blog about them!"). And being the OCD creature that I am, I can't in good conscience write about a failurecake without having a picture of them to drive the point home. Rest assured, they were as ugly as they were messy: the raspberry filling looked like brain matter, poking through the watery lemon icing, refusing to be hidden. I will be retooling the recipe with more solid filling and fluffy (rather than drippy-ish) lemon icing, and when I do I will discuss the failurecakes in greater detail at that time.

Vegan Cranberry-Pear Pie

I am having a very hard time deciding how I am going to organize the menu for the bakery. This makes sense, considering how anal I am. I just got a new wallet today, and deciding how to organize my stuff in it has been driving me nuts. There are too many different compartments, and I the stuff I have doesn't organize into the compartments properly. Frustration.

 Anyway, so I've been throwing around ideas for the bakery menu, and it's giving me trouble. Should I separate it by baked good type (breakfast, breads, desserts), or by specialized type of good (regular, vegan, gluten-free, vegan and gluten-free)? Should I only offer specific combinations of dessert, or offer different crusts/fillings/cakes/frostings etc. and for orders let people put together whatever they want? I could also just have a menu of desserts and specify what they were available in, whether it be vegan, gluten-free, both, or neither. I'm beginning to lean towards doing it by make-your-own, at least for the desserts, since there are so many specialized types of goods, and then I could make menu suggestions and then just bake whatever combination I wanted on whatever given day depending on how I felt.
Let me know what y'all would think, plz.
Anyway, here is my pear-cranberry pie with almond crust. The recipe I used actually had so much leftover filling that I made another open-face pie with an oat crust. Overall the feedback was pretty positive. People also thought the pear was actually apple at first, but most people figured it out after a few bites. I think next time I will add more cranberries and less pear, because while it was good, I felt it was bordering on apple-pie-like, and I'd prefer for it to have more of a punch than apple pie. The only criticism was that a crispier crust would have been good. I covered it with tin foil for the first two thirds of the baking time, so next time I'll lower that time or not do tinfoil all together.