Chocolate cake. Sometimes that’s all you need - a nice slab of it, nothing fancy, no fruit or mint nor hint of citrus. They say that chocolate mimics the euphoria of being in love, but how do they know that love isn’t mimicking chocolate? It could choose a worse role model.

This is my basic chocolate cake recipe, the same as the chocolate cupcakes in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World. It’s rich and tender and just exactly what I want when biting into a piece of cake, moistness and melt in your mouth crumbs. I top it with an extra fudgy chocolate ganache that gets it delectible gloopiness from a couple tablespoons maple syrup. In this photo, I’ve doubled the recipe to make a two layer cake and added a little bit of a creamy cocoa buttercream that I’ve been working on. Another benefit to this recipe is that the cake doesn’t dome too much so it’s perfect for layer cakes.

Chocolate Cake

Makes one 8 inch circle cake

1 cup almond milk (or your favorite non-dairy milk)
1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar
3/4 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup canola oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon almond extract

1 cup all-purpose flour
1/3 cup cocoa powder, Dutch-processed or regular (or a mix of both)
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt


Preheat oven to 350?F.

Whisk together the soy milk and vinegar in a large bowl, and set aside for a few minutes to curdle. Add the sugar, oil, vanilla and almond extract and mix well.

In a separate bowl, sift together the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Add in two batches to wet ingredients and beat until no large lumps remain (a few tiny lumps are OK).

Lightly grease an 8 inch springform pan. Pour in the batter and bake for 32 to 35 minutes, until a toothpick inserted through the center comes out clean.

Gooey Ganache

2/3 cup almond milk (or your favorite non-dairy milk)
8 oz semi sweet chocolate chips
3 tablespoons pure maple syrup

In a small saucepan bring the milk to a boil then lower heat to a simmer. Add the chocoate chips and maple syrup and mix with a fork. Turn heat off and mix until thoroughly melted. Let cool for about 15 minutes before using.

To assemble:

Just pour the ganache over the cooled cake and kind of tilt the cake at all angles to get the ganache to drip down the sides. Refrigerate to cool and set the ganache.

When I’m confronted with an abundance of fruit my first thought is, “Fine, whatever, I’ll make muffins. I can take a hint!” But this isn’t about my first thought, it’s about my second, much more important thought, which is “How the hell do I make a barbecue sauce out of this?”

And so it was with our legions of blueberries. The secret to getting a really nice deep flavor is to cook the sauce down for a good long time. That concentrates all the flavors and makes it lusciously thick like a BBQ sauce should be. I didn’t feel like cheating and using liquid smoke for the smokiness, not this time. Instead, chipotle powder giveth smoke and spice. If you haven’t been knocked over the head enough with this information, chipotle is smoked jalapeno peppers. In this case, they’ve been dried and ground up. I’m not a spicy heat fiend by any measure, but I guess I can handle my own. If you are wimpy then use only two teaspoons, or use smoked paprika, which is milder and also more readily available.

If you haven’t tried chipotle powder, give it a go! I got mine from Penzy’s and I’ve been using it in a variety of dishes; roasted potatoes, chili (well, obviously), scrambled tofu, split pea soup. It’s really been pulling its weight around the kitchen.

Fine, it didn’t photograph all that well. Lay off, it can’t be perfect!

Blueberry Chipotle Barbecue Sauce
Makes about 4 cups

1 tablespoon peanut oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 inch chunk of peeled ginger, minced
2 cups blueberries (I bet raspberries or blackberries would be great, too)
1/2 cup veggie broth or water
2 tablespoons ketchup
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 to 3 teaspoons chipotle powder (smoked paprika would work too)
1/4 cup molasses
2 tablespoons sugar (or more to taste)
Salt to taste, if needed

Preheat a sauce pan over medium heat. Saute the onions in the oil for about 10 minutes, until lightly browned. Add the garlic and ginger, saute for a minute more.

Add the blueberries, veggie broth and soy sauce and bring to a boil. Once boiling, add the chipotle, molasses and sugar. Lower heat and let simmer for about 45 minutes, until it’s reduced by about half. It should be nice and thick. Adjust sugar and salt if you need to. Turn the heat off and let sit for about 15 minutes before using, stirring occasionally.

I used the BBQ sauce on tofu and tempeh. For the tofu, I pressed it and dredged in 2 tablespoons peanut oil and 2 tablespoons soy sauce. Bake for about 20 minutes, then flip and coat with lots of sauce. Bake for 15 more minutes. Same for the tempeh, only I steamed that for about 10 minutes. I love the way basmati or jasmine rice taste with BBQ sauce, so make me happy and serve rice alongside.

Some stuff to keep you occupied and out of the nice weather this weekend.

For vegans who hate kids. Joshy lays the smackdown on ya.

Veganfriendly’s tour of Portland. A little old, but so am I.

Coming around to food porn (no pun intended) on Vegans of Color.

And new vegan shoes for men! The website is annoyingly Flash, but the shoes look pretty cool and different than what’s currently out there. Plus, the company is called The Vegan Collection. Which is soooo official sounding.

And here’s my newest kitty, Kirby. I saved him from certain death only so he might pee on my forking bed.

Edited to add: If you want to continue this “conversation” please do so at Josh’s new entry.

Berry week! It’s like shark week, except more delicious. But I swear to god it’s just as dangerous. At our berry picking expedition I was stung by a hornet, pricked with thorns, tripped over a vine and scabbed at least one knee.

The other weird thing about berry week is that it begins on Thursday, skips the weekend and then continues on Monday. It’s more a berry business days.

Our first recipe is for Marionberry Lavendar Scones, and now that the weather is cooling down a bit for most of us, why not bake a dozen on Sunday morning? Lavender always seems like a foofy kind of ingredient, only suitable for the kind of person that talks about the “legs” on wine and the hickory undertones of chocolate. But, really, it’s just a nice fragrant taste that is the perfect backdrop for sweet tart berries. If you can’t get your hands on any, try 2 tablespoons of fresh chopped rosemary instead.

Scones are kind of a pain in the butt if you’re making them into triangles, so just do the scoop and drop method with these. They’re light and crumbly like a scone should be, and the batter isn’t too sweet but the light sprinkling of sugar on the tops is a perfect little sweet roof to bite through. We had to trudge through the mud to get the last of the marionberries so they might not be available everywhere right now. In that case, you can’t go wrong with blueberries, blackberries or raspberries.

Thanks to my berry cohorts, Kimmy Kokunut and Veganknitting! In the next few days, their recipe for Blueberry Ginger Jam. Kimmy actually did most of the work for these scones, I just closely supervised.

Marionberry Lavender Scones

Makes 12 scones

1 1/4 cups almond milk (or your non-dairy milk of choice)

2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar

3 cups flour

2 tablespoons baking powder

1/2 cup sugar, plus extra for sprinkling

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 cup fresh culinary lavender, chopped

1/2 cup non hydrogenated shortening

2 tablespoons canola oil

1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract

2 cups marionberries, or berries of your choice
Preheat the oven to 375 F. Lightly grease a baking sheet or line with parchment paper. Measure out the milk and add the vinegar to it. Set aside to curdle.

Mix together the flour, baking powder, salt and sugar in a large mixing bowl. Add the shortening in small clumps, then use your fingers to cut it into the flour until it appears like small pebbles. (You an also use a food processor for this, but I prefer to use my hands.) Mix in the lavender.

Create a well in the center and add the soy milk, oil and vanilla. Mix with a wooden spoon just a bit, then add in the berries. Mix again until everything is moistened, but don’t overmix. A couple of dry looking spots are just fine.

Use a 1/4 cup measuring up to scoop the scones out on to the baking sheet. Spray it wth cooking spray first so that the batter comes out easier.

Sprinkle tops with a bit more sugar, then bake for 18 to 22 minutes, until tops are firm to the touch and lightly browned. Serve warm!

This isn’t about me. I could care less about the accolades of cookbook writing. I mean, I do it for the kids man, and that guy on the street that doesn’t know how to grill tempeh. That poor guy.

But Terry. Terry needs this to survive, it’s like her oxygen. Don’t let her down. Don’t let her suffocate.

Vote for me and Terry in the VegNews awards. Second page. You can leave other categories blank if you don’t know so don’t stress. Terry thanks you. Me, I can take it or leave it, you know that.

Just picture a tear in her eye. I know it’s there.

If you bring Tofurky jerky to the At The Gates Show or listen to Carcass while prepping your non-carcass dinner, you have to check out Possessed By Seitan from the mysterious Vegan Metal Horde. The latest entry is Lovecraftian themed music.

Cookies And Corrupted, just like mom used to make. Just kidding, women don’t listen to Corrupted!

Herbivore Clothing has redone their website so now it’s, like, easy to buy stuff on it. Gone are the days when it took half a work day to find that stinkin’ recycled wallet.

My friend Abby is doing Nostalgiamania, this really fun blog that chronicles her life in ticket stubs, as far back as those distant 80s. I was at a lot of the shows with her so it’s really fun for me, but her writing makes it a good read for anyone that has ever found ticket stub in a shoebox and then spent a half hour spacing out and reminiscing.

At the end of the summer you might notice your Italian American friends unable to play croquet with you for an entire weekend because they’re “making sauce.” I was always really jealous of this ritual. Jealous because it was the essence of a domesticity that always seemed out of my reach. And also really jealous because I never had a yard.

Homemade tomato sauce in all its glory

While looking for some info on this here internet, I didn’t really find any really good directions for from scratch tomato sauce, so hopefully this little photo essay will be helpful. This is basically what I’ve gleaned from sitting in my friend’s kitchen when I was ten and just talking to my friends about making sauce. You don’t need any fancy equipment, just a bunch of hours to kill and preferably a friend or two to make it with you. Forget 30 minute meals, how about 6 hour ones? What better way to bond with someone than over a simmering pot garlicky tomato sauce? Video games or a movie have got nothing on this.

Michelle and I were painfully naive when we thought we would actually make enough sauce to jar it for the winter. I didn’t weigh them, but we had 3 dozen* nice sized tomatoes that ended up making about two spaghetti sauce jarfuls of sauce. Instead of giving you a recipe, I am just going to give guidelines, since your quantity and ingredients may vary. Good olive oil and lots of garlic are obvious, and for herbs we had a lot of oregano and thyme so that is what we used. I would definitely recommend fresh herbs, though.

Okay, make with the sauce! Besides the good old standbys like a knife and cutting board, here’s what you’ll need to have ready:

• At least three big mixing bowls since there will be lots of transferring and prepping going on.
• A lot of ice for shocking the tomatoes once they’ve been blanched.
• An immersion blender or just a regular old blender.
• A big gigantic pot, or what I call a “soup kitchen pot.”
• A slotted spoon.

First you’ll need to boil a huge pot of water. We’re going to blanch the tomatoes to get their skin off. To make peeling easy you score the tomatoes with an “X” on the tops and bottoms.

We didn’t even bother pulling the stickers off our tomatoes since they are going to be skinned anyway. Once the water is boiling, prepare your ice bath. Just fill a big bowl with half ice, half cold water. Have it at the ready.

Drop your tomatoes into the boiling water in manageable batches. We did somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 at a time. Blanching means you are just flash boiling them, we found that one minute worked best. When the minute is up, fish them out with a slotted spoon and transfer them to the ice bath.

Michelle was working at lightening speed!

Once everyone has been ice bathed and is cool to the touch, it’s time to move on to the peeling. It should be really easy, just peel down from where you’ve scored. Place all the peeled guys in a bowl.

Now it’s time for seeding. Slice the tomato across the waist, not top to bottom. This will give you the best access to the seeds. Next, we seed! Just smush your fingers in there and get the seeds out. Do it over a bowl so that you can strain the liquid later and have tomato juice. If there are a few seed stragglers, don’t worry about it. Just do the best you can.

Once the seeds are out, over a big separate bowl, pull all the tomato-y stuff away from the rough core at the top and drop the rest into the bowl. Discard the cores. We toyed with cutting around the core, but this way was the fastest, most efficient and the funnest. The bottom halves of the tomato won’t have the core/stem thingy, obviously, so just mush those up with your fingers and drop them in.

Now comes the delicious smelling part. We used about half a head of minced garlic and just a small amount of chopped red onion, maybe a cup’s worth. In the big pot that you blanched the tomatoes in, saute the garlic and onion in an ample amount of olive oil, a few tablespoon’s worth. When onion is translucent, add the tomatoes, along with salt and black pepper. Don’t over salt, it is going to cook down and concentrate. We used a scant teaspoon. Also, add some sugar to cut down on the acidity. Four teaspoons worked perfectly for our tomatoes, your mileage may vary.

The next step is easy, you just cook it uncovered until it reduces to about 1/4 its amount. This was accomplished in about 2 hours. Keep the heat high and stir often. It will start smelling like Sicily within half an hour. Once it’s cooked down, puree with an immersion blender, or in batches in your regular blender. Then add fresh herbs, but be frugal about it. As you’ll see the sauce tastes rich and succulent without them and you don’t want to mask the taste, you just want to accentuate it. Simmer for just a few minutes more to let the herbs release their magic.

Just like mama never made.

I can honestly say that I’ve never tasted anything so amazing. Like I said, we were surprised to be left with such a small amount, but you know what? It was totally worth it and we’d do it again in a heart beat. Viva the sloth food movement!

*These tomatoes didn’t actually come from my yard, they were a windfall from a camping trip last weekend. But the tomatoes in my garden are doing really well so I expect I’ll be doing this again in a little while.