Happy Belated Birthday to ME

Yesterday (November 9th) was my birthday. And while reading through the VeganMoFo feed today I noticed that there were quite a lot of vegans out there that also share their birthday with Mr Carl Sagan. So Happy Belated Birthday to you too.

Now, as I mentioned in my last post, I had been marinating some tofu in pepperoni spices. This was because the plan for my birthday was to have pizza with my family. Nothing special, but something somewhat new.

Yesterday when I cooked my tofu I ended up forgetting about it. We don’t have a food timer in the house and I just kind of blanked out. As a result, my tofu was waaay overdone. There was just no way it was making it’s way to a pizza. But pieces of it were still edible and I have to admit that the tofu-pepperoni probably would have been quite excellent on a pizza. I’d make it again if it weren’t so time intensive. You see, I’m not the type to plan ahead well, so the pressing, freezing, thawing & (8+ hour) marinading prior to actually baking the tofu just isn’t going to cut it for me. Thankfully, I had already planned on making seitan pepperoni as well, so I was no left in the lurch.

I followed this recipe for making seitan pepperoni. I made my logs fairly smaller so I reduced the cooking time slightly. The end result was really good. Though, next time I might increase the red pepper flakes and add a little olive oil to the mix.

I can’t imagine making this with gluten dough that you’ve made from regular wheat flour. the kneading and rinsing of starches from the dough in order to get a good seitanic dough would rinse out too much of your spices and flavorings. So if you are one of those people that make your seitan the old fashioned way I’d recommend buying the Vital Wheat Gluten for this one

I then set about making cupcakes and my pizza dough.

I used Mark Bittman’s recipe for simple pizza dough. I love the yummy yeast flavor and the texture of the crust it provides.

1 teaspoon instant or rapid rise yeast
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp or sea salt
1 1/4 cups water
Olive Oil

Mix together your flour, yeast & salt. Then add the water & a couple Tbsp of Olive Oil slowly until you have a good dough that isn’t too wet/sticky.
Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured surface and knead it briefly. You want to get the dough to form a nice smooth little ball. Grease your bowl and turn your dough over in a it a bit before covering it and leaving it to rise some place warm until it doubles in size. Mine took an hour because of all the baking I was doing already).
Preheat your oven to 500° F. Commercial Pizza ovens cook pizzas at very high heat, so this is the next best thing. Spread your dough out onto your baking sheet/pizza pan/whatever. Cover with your toppings and cook for 10-12 minutes.

My pizza was fantastic. I used Gimme Lean sausage and Daiya shreds. It was s typical kid-approved pizza. And more importantly, my parents approved.

I also made mint chocolate cupcakes. I used the chocolate cupcake recipe from Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World and added a small amount of mint extract. I used my pretty new mini bundt cake pan and I am super duper impressed. The large amount of cooking surface equates to shorter cooking time and increased carmelization of the sugars. Ever single surface of this little cake was so sweet that I scrapped the idea of making any kind of frosting.