Pre-St. Patty's Update

I was going to wait to talk about these, but oh my goodness these are the most amazing cupcakes I've ever had!  AND they are vegan.

Let me start from the beginning.

Being mostly (well, probably summing up to half) Irish, I approach St. Patrick's day with a strange hodgepodge of food traditions gathered from both sides of my family.  It's funny to realize that my cooking has been largely influenced by my mostly German grandmothers, but some of my family's traditions come from Americanized cuisine, and some are the result of catering one of my grandfathers, who is mostly Irish.

It's perhaps silly for me to talk about family members being "mostly this" and "mostly that," but this is how we identify ourselves.  Yes, from the outside we're American.  From the inside, well, let me put it this way: As far as I know, my entire lineage can be traced to people who immigrated to the United States from - you got it - mostly Ireland and Germany in the mid to late 19th century.  The most recent immigrant in my family is one of my great-grandfathers, who came to America from Germany as a little boy.  What ethnic traditions that have trickled down through the generations are miscellaneous and diluted, but still a part of how I identify myself as a member of my family.

All that said, I like to cook something Irish when St. Patrick's day rolls around.  In the past, this has meant corned beef and cabbage, and maybe some Guinness with dinner.  This year, since I'm eating mostly vegan (yes, the 'mostly' qualifier is ubiquitous today), I've had to be more creative with my food choices.  Also, this year, since I'm busy and Thursday is not a day to cook for 3 hours, I've been doing a lot of prep work this week.

Tonight, I decided to go ahead and prepare a vegan Chocolate Stout cupcake recipe I found last weekend.  The recipe doesn't require any unusual vegan ingredients, but it does call for about half a bottle of chocolate stout.  That's right, there's beer in these cupcakes.  And oh, are they delicious.  I tasted one while it was still warm, and ended up eating two.

As of when they were still a little warm, these are fluffy, moist cupcakes, with a rich chocolate flavor.  That flavor is due, of course, to a hefty helping of unsweetened cocoa powder both in the cupcakes and in the crumbs topping them.  The bitterness of the stout really enhances the chocolate, adding a depth of flavor I never would have expected.

I am posting this now so that if you want to make some of these for Thursday, you can have a little bit of time to go ahead and try them.  Seriously, you will not regret it.  Unless you end up eating them all, and then you might.

the roving researcher

I do a lot of theory and simulation work in my research, and so I find that I can sit down anywhere with a power cord and an internet connection to get work done.  Of course, the challenge of this is that there are many places where I sit down and get no work done whatsoever.  Working at home is perhaps the worst, because I tend to oversleep, and then do kitchen things or crochet or watch TV while I'm "working."  It's shameful, I know, and the only solution I've come up with so far is to just go to my office.  The only problem with my office, however, is that it's a solid 15 minute walk from any other places on campus I have to be, and so there are days when it's just not worth the time (this includes days like last week when the temperature was -5˚F).

Maybe some of the issue here is that I haven't yet gotten used to the paradigm of not having a physical lab space.  I did experimental Physics research before, so I had to be in the lab to get work done.  There were no gray lines between work time and personal time.  Changes of venue, and their subsequent disruption of pace, were not an option.  Now they are, and I need to learn to stay put or else to lose less time in transition.  We'll see how that goes.

Or I could just work in my office and deal with the walking time.  It's especially useful to work there when other people are there and working (yay peer pressure!), plus it gives me a great opportunity to share my latest cookie adventure with people...

136. Cream-Filled Chocolate Sandwiches
If these look like Oreos to you, that's because that is basically what these cookies are.  As the title indicates, these are chocolate cookies sandwiched with vanilla cream.  The cookies get their chocolate flavor from a hefty dose of dutched cocoa, and are otherwise a little soft and kind of generic.  The filling is made with too much fat (1/2C butter and 1/2C vegetable shortening) and sugar (3+C confectioners' sugar!), which makes it taste even more sinful than your typical Oreo filling.

Basically, these cookies were pretty (as you can see), and very decadent.  Although the cookies themselves are pretty generic, they pair nicely with the filling to give a rich flavor and texture experience, and leave you with the lingering feeling that you're going to get both heart failure and type 2 diabetes.


I realize I promised two cookies this week, and I did make another vegan cookie - Peanut Apple Pretzel Drops - to share at a Superbowl party, but I neglected to take pictures.  You can find the recipe here, if you're interested.  These cookies have pretzels, peanuts, dried apples, and cinnamon (plus lots of brown sugar and such) in them, and made a tasty and even a little bit healthy snack.  I'm a fan (although I liked the green tea biscotti better).

snowverrated...

Okay, I admit it's cheap of me to go for a snow pun, since they are overabundant this week.  And, to be fair, the roads were pretty awful here today.  Thankfully, Champaign has a magical weather protection bubble which, although my meteorology friend complains makes things boring, means that the really bad weather skirts around us.

As far as the Midwest "Snowpocalyse" goes, this means we had a lot of sleet yesterday, but not the foot of snow that was originally predicted.  Classes were cancelled today, and even though this didn't really disrupt anything for me (I'm not taking any classes and I don't teach on Wednesdays), I am still happy to call this my first snow day since the fourth grade.  Of course, this just meant that I worked from home, until it was time to dig my car out and make Phil take a break from running experiments in the wind tunnel to have dinner with me.  He's been super busy, which has meant I've been wasting (too much) time with my newfound craft, crocheting.  I am making a blanket, perhaps I will post a picture when I am finished.

The green color depends on your matcha.
Clearly, mine isn't very green.

I've also found myself tempted to pick up another project, and this one is totally my mom's fault: she gave me a vegan cookie recipe book for my birthday, and nearly everything looks amazing.  I'm not sure if I'm ready to commit to tacking another 100 weeks onto this cookie project, but I've already flipped through and noted a few of the recipes I'd like to try, including Grapefruit Icebox Cookies and Tahini Lime Cookies.  There was one recipe, however, that caught my attention so strongly I had to try it right away, and thus I ended up making Green Tea Walnut Biscotti last weekend (recipe can be found here).  Yes, these are vegan, and even though they have no animal product in them, they taste AMAZING.  That said, I am a huge fan of matcha, or green tea powder, so if you don't like green tea you might not be so excited about these.  But if you do, I strongly recommend trying this.  Biscotti are very easy to make, although they take upwards of an hour to bake.  Also, if you're not interested in buying ground flax seeds (i.e. you don't want a vegan recipe), you can omit the flax and a couple tablespoons of water and add an egg instead.

135. Amaretti Crisps
Saturday was kind of a weird and lazy day for me, starting with a malfunction in CRCE's sound system that badly disrupted my kickboxing class, and ending with a surprise birthday cake.  And so when I picked out cookies, I picked out something that matched my level of laziness, and which only called for four ingredients.  That's right, there's almonds, almond extract, confectioners' sugar, and egg whites in these cookies, and nothing more.

These cookies are made by whipping egg whites until they form stiff peaks, then folding them into a mixture of sugar and ground almonds, then adding the extract to give more flavor.  They were supposed to be put into a pastry bag and squeezed into cute little wreath shapes, but my pastry bag is broken, so I decided to go with the tablespoon option instead.  This may have made the cookies look a little less pretty, but I don't think it was really a problem.

The result of this recipe was a light, crisp (hence the name), and strongly almond-flavored cookie.  They are super easy to make, assuming you have an electric mixer, and everyone in my research group really liked them.  I recommend this recipe as a simple, low-risk way to try sharing a new kind of cookie with people.


Alright, that's it for now.  I've got to get back to simulating pressure pulses in tubes of random shapes.  Yay Matlab!  More cookies next week, with another vegan recipe as well.