Sweets

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You don’t need to go without anything if you are vegan. You can certainly have your cake and eat it too especially at Christmas. This vegan Christmas cake is a favourite of many of my newsletter subscribers.

Be warned, I am really serious this time, this is moreish and you will want to make it again and again. Good news is, it is packed with calcium, potassium, iron, fibre and contains selenium, so it is a really good slice for a go-to treat. It freezes well for 3 months.

In celebration I share with you all my jam drop recipe which has been adapted from a recipe my beautiful friend Ghata gave me earlier this year.

These are a classic Aussie dessert made vegan and healthier. They last well in the fridge for a couple of weeks or in the freezer for 3 months.

A few weeks ago I facilitated the menopause cooking and nutrition workshop. It was a wonderful day of learning and lots of cooking. Calcium is incredibly important for perimenopause and menopause. To be honest it is essential for all stages of your life so make sure you are eating plenty of food rich in calcium today. And what better way to do it than with a yummy sweet treat.

If you are wanting a cake that is moist and super delicious and also is actually not bad for you, in fact is rather good for you then this is the cake. This recipe is an adaptation of the banana cake I have in my cook book.

Last minute spot has come up in this week’s Vegan Foundation Course. Who is ready for some spontaneity and wants to take the jump and join in this 3 days of wonderful cooking? You will take home not only incredible food but more than 60 recipes, a cook book and a big manual full of really good information, along with loads and loads of tips and tricks to make life in the kitchen a whole lot of fun.

Cooking tip 102 making your own chocolate is one of those things you will wish you had always been doing. Making your own chocolate is much better than buying it. Three reasons why: it’s cheaper, you can regulate what you put in it and it is always available in the fridge or freezer, you don’t have to make a trip to the shop when you feel like a piece of chocolate.

As many of you may know change is happening for the Vegan Cooking School and myself. In November we need to move from our home of nine years. We are on the look out for somewhere to buy to live in and continue running the cooking school from. It is our dream to stay as close to the Mullumbimby region as possible. As a small business owner I thought it would be impossible to secure a home loan but have recently found out that I can get a loan if I can show I have earned $75,000 by the end of this financial year (June 30th). I actually fall $18,000 short of this amount. It feels very important that I secure this loan and that we are able to buy a house, not only so we have somewhere to live but also so I can keep on running the wonderful courses I facilitate and offer the private cooking and nutrition sessions I am launching.

I have just finished facilitating the third day of the raw cuisine module of the vegan chef training. This also is a stand alone module so once people have finished the foundation course they are welcome to come and attend the raw cuisine course too and what a treat you will be in for. We have made sensational food over the last three days with another day to go. One of the extension recipes is so good and it definitely has been a while between drinks (or should I say between raw treats), that’s for sure. I wasn’t able to teach this module last year so I haven’t made this treat for 19 months and I can’t believe I had forgotten how deadly (that means ‘awesome’ in the NT where I grew up) it really is. It’s so good that I feel the world needs to have access to the recipe.

The more I learn at university in my nutrition degree the more I see the evidence of how healthy a plant based diet really is. I have always known it instinctively but now it is wonderful to see the science to back it up. Having said this though it is important like with any food style you wish to follow that you ensure you are including all essential nutrients, vitamins and minerals in your cooking.

Isn’t it time for a sweet treat? I certainly think so, it feels like a very long time since I have shared a sweet treat recipe with you. This one was definitely worth waiting for. It was created on the last vegan foundation cooking school. You can make these orange, cranberry coconut crunch chocolates in a big batch and have them in a ready supply in your freezer. You will never want to run out of these. If you have a heart mold that is fabulous, otherwise any mold will do or you can just put in a baking paper lined tray and break pieces chocolate off.

Still on mood foods this week. I don’t know about you but it has been an up and down week for me. When feeling the blues one of the better foods to reach for is raw cacao. This recipe is essentially a smoothie but if you put less liquid in you can eat it as a mousse.

This week’s blog comes with quite a story. I hope you love stories. I love stories, my grandmother always told us stories and I would relish in every word. Its book review week and I am reviewing a very special book this week that unfortunately isn’t for sale. It’s a family cookbook of my best friend from school’s grandmother. Penny Curtis and I have been friends since we were eleven. We both grew up in the Northern Territory. We loved our grandmothers and talked of them fondly. They both lived elsewhere mine in New York state and Penny’s in Herberton, Queensland.

It’s celebration week this week for Veet’s Vegan Cooking School. On the 19th May 2008 I first started my business. Wow that feels so long ago, much longer than twelve years. It was huge for me to go out on my own and create a business as I had always been in paid employment and came from a family who were in paid employment.

Hope you are all having a good week despite all the uncertainty in the world right now. Also hope you are having more time to cook. Let me know what’s cooking at your house. Isn’t it time for a sweet recipe? It’s been a while since I last posted a sweet recipe so here I am with a delectable treat. It is also book review week again. Wow the months go fast yet when I think about what has happened in this last month it feels like a year ago.

Hello Everyone, hope you are all safe and well and those of you affected by bushfires, my prayers, thoughts and love are with you. This is my first blog post of 2020. It was lovely to have a few weeks break from sending out newsletters and I am so excited to be writing again. Someone asked me if I like doing my blog posts and my reply was “I love it, I love sharing recipes and I love writing. What I struggle with is getting photos that are good enough to attach to the blog posts. Photography is not one of my strong points. Anyway it is not stopping me. I have great plans for regular blog posts in 2020 with fantastic recipes. So keep those requests coming in.

Its recipes for children week. This week’s recipe is vegan trifle just in time for Christmas. I am not sure if all children like trifle but guess what, I loved it. It was one of my favourite parts of Christmas growing up.

If you haven’t already been, I highly recommend going to Canberra and visiting one of my all time favourite cafes ever; Sweet Bones Bakery and Café . It’s in the city suburb of Braddon and sells the most delicious everything. The café is hip yet down to earth and I feel so at home when I go to eat there. Emily and Russell Brindly are the owners of Sweet Bones and along with bringing up two small boys; Banjo and Bo, they do an epic job of serving up not only great food, drinks and cakes but also making celebration and wedding cakes. All vegan of course.

Prior to going on my holiday I found my well loved copy of Zorba the Buddha Cookbook. I had misplaced it for more than a year and was really missing it. When I found it I was almost tempted not to go on holiday so I could recreate all the recipes and make them vegan as a lot of the recipes in Zorba the Buddha are laden with dairy. I resisted staying home but on return from India I started experimenting. This is the second recipe I have adapted and it’s a winner.