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Vegan and delicious!

I have the best recipe for vegan(!) chocolate chip zucchini banana walnut bread. Find it here! Remember - the chocolate has to be vegan for this to be a truly vegan bread. I do believe (but don't quote me on this) that Ghirardelli's dark chocolate is vegan.

I use a whole grated medium zucchini. It works out to a bit more than a cup, but the bread still works well and you don't have any leftover zucchini sitting in your fridge. To be fair, I also add more than one half cup chocolate chips! When is more chocolate a bad thing?

Tomorrow, I'll be putting this excellent bread as well as some mint chocolate cupcakes in the OSU Anthropology Grad Lab. Bring a few quarters to throw in my donation box for Team in Training or donate on my super spiffy website here! Donations are tax deductible.

Team-in-Training

Welcome to the next installment of the Boulangerie St. Louis website! I've decided to merge two things I love, baking and running, into this one blog! I'll be baking small cakes, cookies, and cupcakes throughout training and selling them at the Ohio State University to help fundraise for my Team in Training event - the Cleveland Marathon next spring.

Team in Training raises money and awareness for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. This society strives to find cures for leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin's disease, and myeloma. The Columbus, OH team is particularly lucky - the money we raise goes directly to the James Cancer Center on campus. Our money makes a difference right in our own backyard!

The fabulous coaches at TinT have suggested that I keep you all up-to-date on my training efforts. Team training starts in December, but I'm still out hitting the road several times every week. Yesterday I ran an easy, breezy 5k on the Olentangy Trail and tried to imagine what the last 5k of a marathon would feel like.

Stay tuned for more training and baking blogging! Please donate through my website by clicking HERE.

Tips, tricks, and good advice from Mme. P

I recently had the opportunity to spend the weekend at M. and Mme. P's place and picked up some hand-dandy cooking tips and easy recipes while I was at it. As much for my benefit as for yours, I'm going to briefly note them here!

1.) Hand-held blenders = joy for beating egg whites to stiff peaks

2.) A Kitchen-Aid is essential to lifelong happiness. Waiting until one is established somewhere is also a good idea as they are expensive and heavy. They are less expensive in the United States than in France.

3.) Rillettes can be made from fish! as well as from meat. Essentially, she cooked the fish (mackeral), pulled the meat apart with a fork, took out the bones, then mixed in a little mayonnaise and some herbs. Chez Mme. P, yes, the herbs were from the garden and mayonnaise was homemade, but if you make it as far as boiling fish with their heads on, I won't count store-bought mayonnaise and herbs against you.

4.) I asked Mme. P about the macarons sticking in the pan. Nope, you can't coat the Flexipans with anything because in that case, "why bother having them?" But what you can do, is not use the middle- to low-quality and use only the high-quality ones. I'm going to attempt macarons again before leaving France. But I am going to use my LSB to beat the egg whites into submission.

5.) Salmon: French salmon in France, Alaskan salmon in the United States.

6.) Apples retain the pesticides in the skin. If you can't buy bio, buy a peeler.

7.) If you have trouble digesting bell peppers, peel them too. Don't get me wrong, it's not easy. But apparently it helps. (Talk about embarassing! I tried to 'help out' in the kitchen by peeling the bell peppers and Mme. P had to take them away from me because I was taking so long!)

8.) Mache helps to prevent certain cancers (that's from M. P actually).

9.) You MUST have a little electronic scale in the kitchen (at least to cook on the metric system). It makes little beeping noises, I'm fascinated and kind of want one.

10.) Apple tart made easy! (Yes, I'm in an apple phase)
--Roll out puff pastry onto flat cookie sheet/flexisheet
--Sprinkle some brown sugar on the pastry
--Mandolin apples as thin as possible
--Layer apples onto puff pastry
--Sprinkle brown sugar onto apples, add a few small dollops of butter
--Cook in an oven at 350 until it's done.
--If the puff pastry puffffffffs way up - don't worry. It'll calm down when you take it out of the oven. It's just angry that it's getted baked!

Thanks Mme. P!

14.) Banana Cake #2

Cakes without recipes are fun. But when taking a 7 hour road trip, it's maybe better to say Yes! Give me a recipe! I took this cake on the road, so there are no photos. However, the whole thing was devoured and that speaks for itself.

To the right is a photo of the Mont St. Michel. Construction on this site began during the 1oth century AD and continued until the 18th century. Today, several monks still live in the monastery but it is essentially a very impressive tourist operation. A winding path lined with tourist trap shops and museums leads up, up, and up to the top of the mount. Once inside though, it's very easy to imagine what life may have been like in this austere and severe building hundreds of years ago.

The recipe!

¼ cup milk
2 ripe bananas
1 cup sugar
2 cups self raising flour
2 eggs
60 g (2 oz) butter

Combine milk and peeled mashed bananas. Add sugar, sifted flour, lightly beaten eggs, softened butter to milk and bananas. Beat until your arm feels like it might fall off. Turn mixture into flexipan. Bake in low to moderate oven approx 40 minutes or until done. Cool 10 minutes before turning out to complete cooling.

13.) Chocolate-walnut brownie-cake

Chocolate walnut cake is a success! The evidence is to the right. No. He did not eat it all in one sitting. But at the same time, no. There is not any left.

This cake was incredibly easy! The walnuts came from M. and Mme. P's own walnut tree. Having said that I will remind you that walnuts from trees do not come in plastic bags. Also, there is no nut cracker in this house. (I'm trying to think of some play on words here for nut cracker and my LSB, but nothing springs to mind at the moment). Sans nut cracker, I head to the tool box. A screwdriver? No. A hammer? No. Pliers? Yes! Be forewarned though - walnuts can explode when under too much pressure! A broom is nearly as handy as a mixer when making this cake with hand-cracked walnuts.

I'm a little worried about my big flexipan. By the time the middle was done (springs back to the touch, toothpick inserted comes out clean, sides pulling away from the edge of the pan - as per Mom's instructions!), the bottom was slightly toasty (read verging on burnt and tasting slightly like charcoal). Also, when I flipped the cake out (and remember, with this pan, the top is supposed to be the bottom because the bottom (the part of the cake in the pan) is supposed to be the shiny glorious top), it collapsed! Look closely at the magnificent photo! The middle is sagging. Sadly sagging or sagging sadly, comme tu veux (as you like!)! Not cool flexipan!

This is a close-up of the chocolate walnut brownie-cake. I'm calling it a brownie-cake because with its sadly sagging center (I'm big into alliteration today) it was dense like a brownie instead of fluffy like a cake.

Looks tasty. Tasted tasty. One could even say. . . terribly toothsome!

LSB suggested that I include my recipes on my blog so that those with an adventurous spirit can follow in my very tentative baking footsteps. Here is the brownie-cake recipe.

• 170 g dark chocolate
  
• 120 g softened butter
• 200 g sugar (sifted)
  
• 3 eggs
  
• 80 g flour (sifted)
• 5-6 walnuts (as desired)
  

-Preheat oven to 225°c
-Break chocolate into pieces, add 3 tbs. water, melt in microwave (1 minute). Mix until chocolate is completely melted and let stand while continuing in the recipe.
-Cream sugar into softened butter.
-Beat eggs into butter/sugar.
-Mix in flour.
-Mix in chocolate.
-Mix until smooth.
-Attack 5-6 walnuts with pliers. Mix in the nut meat but not the shells (which are probably on the ground by now anyway!)
-Bake for 25 minutes or until Mom's advice is met.

How is that not incentive for LSB to return my non-functional watch? Oh! And guess what!? It was just the battery! LSB brought back my spiffy and functional! new watch. What a guy!

The Long-Suffering Boyfriend gets what he deserves!

That is my LSB to the right, holding up his end of the world in San Sebastien, Spain. Today he was not vacationing in Spain though, he was returning the (spiffy) non-functional watch I just bought on the other end of the city. How should I thank him!?

Obviously I will bake him a homemade chocolate walnut cake!

Pictures and story for this cake here tomorrow.