Birthday

I have been a bad, bad blogger. Sorry. Hopefully there is anyone out there still reading this occasionally, seeing if I'm still alive or whatever. But anyway, here are some awesome pictures to make up for it...

Last week, Katie cooked up a massive amount of food for a sort-of surprise birthday party for me. Sort of because I knew there was a party and I knew when it was and I knew some of the people coming, but I didn't know about a few really good friends from college who I hadn't seen in ages and I didn't know about a lot of the food.

I, however, knew I was having carrot cake because I had been craving the perfect carrot cake for a long time. The PERFECT carrot cake...it needed to be dense, moist, full of "stuff", spicy, with cream cheese icing and those ubiquitous bright orange piped carrots on top. Two test batches later (without icing), I found it. I had high hopes for the carrot macadamia ginger coconut cake in VWAV, but, as tasty as it is, its just not right...its a lovely spice cake, but its not a carrot cake...just a spice cake with carrots...and the crystalized ginger is very distracting. So I settled on veganizing and de-wheating Sam's Famous Carrot Cake moist but not gummy or heavy, nicely spiced and crunchy-chewy with all the good stuff (walnuts, pineapple, coconut AND carrots!) jammed into this cake. I then made a basic cream cheese icing using earth balance, tofutti cream cheese and organic powdered sugar (just enough to make it sweet but still taste like cheesecake)...add a dash of vanilla and a bunch o recipe from allrecipes.com. 252 4-or-5-star reviews, I figured it was worth it...and omg, yes! I replaced the wheat flour with spelt and a pinch of xanthan gum, Ener-G for the eggs, applesauce for the oil, and almond milk w/ lemon juice for the buttermilk and then added a little ground ginger and a little nutmeg, plus some more carrot as a lot of the reviews recommended. Perfect, perfect, perfect. Dense andf shredded coconut and we had an amazingly tasty icing that quickly negated any health benefits gained by leaving the oil out of the cake, lol! I baked and iced, then was promptly kicked out the kitchen so Katie could decorate. Here are the results:



How professional does that look! My aunt thought the cake was from wegmans and that we were kidding about having baked/decorated it ourselves.

And then Katie whipped out the cupcakes: gluten-free versions of the Mucho Margarita and Mexican Hot Chocolate cupcakes (a hot version and a not-so-hot version) from VCTOTW. They were both amazing but the icing on the margarita ones was out of this world...everyone was raving about them and I ate far too many.





One issue, what is with the gluten-freedom cupcake recipes and their lack of gluten-replacement? No xanthan gum, no egg replacer, no whipped-up silken tofu...Katie made the first batch and they, no surprise, didn't rise at all and were rubbery-dense. Second batch, added some xanthan gum and they were perfect. We both were kind of disappointed in that shortcoming in an otherwise amazing cookbook.

Unfortunately, we were having too much fun catching up with old friends and eating to take pictures of any more food, but there was a taco/burrito bar with mock-a-mole (guac made with half peas, half avocado), homemade mole sauce, roasted veggies, fresh veggies, vegan salsa-cheese dip, spanish rice, jicama salad, tropical chex mix, various salsas and chips, strawberry and blueberry margaritas...way too much really awesome food (and I think we still have some olives left in the fridge). I'm so happy that everyone came and that Katie managed to put everything together with me only knowing a little bit about it (along with my mom, who helped out in the sneakiness).

I'm gonna try to update this at least every couple weeks....its harder now that the weather is getting nicer and we are working hard to get the yard/garden in shape, there are more chances to hike, and I really don't want to stay inside at the computer any more than necessary, but I will make an effort! Hope everyone is having a happy spring!