Beginning with the Past

I've been wanting/meaning to/thinking about starting a blog for quite a while. It's taken a full on sledgehammer-to-the-gut kind of illness to lay me out for long enough to get around to actually beginning though. Unfortunately, this nasty little bug that I picked up has made me so sick that I've been completely uninterested in food (highly unusual). I've been living on juice pops and weak chamomile tea for a week. Starting a food blog when food has itself is settled in an enemy camp plotting nastiness against my poor stomach has seemed a less than pleasant task.

I knew I was on the mend yesterday though when food at least began to seem interesting and possibly pleasant again. I may even attempt to eat some of it soon! In the meantime though, my thoughts turn to dishes of the past. Specifically, I've been thinking about strawberry shortcake. It's a dessert I always make around the spring holidays and this year I missed out on it.

So, let's begin my blogging career by visiting the past.

Strawberry shortcake has been a favorite dessert of mine for as long as I can remember. When I was very young, my neighbor/adoptive grandmother would make me strawberry shortcake, which I would eat in our adjoining backyard, lingering over the strawberry soaked cake and dragging strawberry slices through piles of whipped cream to scoop it all up. Though those strawberry shortcakes were delicious, I'd now rather forgo preservative-laden store bought cakes and "whipped cream" from a spray can. This is my favorite way to do it:



Prepare the strawberries:

Rinse and remove tops of strawberries, slice to desired thickness. (I like nice thick slices.)
Sprinkle dry sweetener(sugar in the raw, Florida crystals, etc.) over the berries to get them to give up some juices. Alternatively, if you'd like to use less sugar, a mixture of sugar and lemon juice will get the strawberries to juice with less much less sweetener.
Stir well and let the berries chill in the fridge until they've produced a good amount of juice. This stage will take at least half an hour, though you'll get more juice the longer you can wait.

Prepare the shortcake:

Turn the oven to 450 degrees

Prepare soured soy milk:
Measure out just about 3/4 cup of soymilk and then add 1/2 T of vinegar to the soymilk. Stir and then let sit until the milk is a little chunky and thick.

Mix the dry ingredients:
about a cup of flour
1 1/2 t. baking powder
1/4 t. cream of tartar
1/4 t. baking soda

Mix 4 T plain applesauce or olive oil or a mixture of the two, depending on how much fat you would like to cut out (or not) with the soured soymilk.

Add the soymilk mixture to the mixed dry ingredients. Combine briefly to get a slightly stiff, but not dry batter. Spoon into about six different mounds on a baking tray lined with parchment paper or sprayed lightly with oil.

Spoon a little extra dry sweetener over top of the batter mounds.

Put in the oven to bake. Check the cakes at 10 minutes, but wait until they are golden to remove them.

Allow the shortcake to cool a little, or if you're like me and can't wait, try to cut one open without burning yourself on the steam.

Spoon some berries onto the bottom half of the cake, top with the other half of the shortcake, more berries. Add some vegan whipped cream* and a generous spoonful of berry sauce.

*When in a hurry I use hip whip, a vegan whipped cream found in the freezer section. Otherwise, I use either a package of silken Mori Nu tofu or about a cup of raw cashews+1/2-3/4 cup of soymilk or soy creamer. I process either of those things until smooth in a food processer and then add 2 tablespoons of agave or maple syrup and 1 or 2 teaspoons of vanilla. This year it was my plan to whip this new soy whipping cream product by Soyatoo in my new Kitchen Aid mixer...I'm still looking forward to trying it out.



Josh and I discovered Soyatoo canned vegan whipped cream in a tiny but lovely health food shop in Budapest last year. Now they make little juicebox sized whipping creams, which is what I got recently from Vegan Essentials, though the mailorder was not as much fun as filling a daypack with whipped cream and walking around a beautiful city with the cans rattling on my back. As a vegan, sometimes you get excited about products you've never seen before, like vegan whipped cream in a can. Josh insisted that we buy several. When we came back into the States, customs officials asked us what we had to declare. We said, "a backpack full of Tokaj (an amazing Hungarian dessert wine made with grapes that have gotten "noble rot," which is pretty much the greatest phrase ever), paprika, and a few cans of soy whipped cream." They asked, "whipped cream?" And we just nodded, solemnly. "Vegan whipped cream." They thought about it a little while, looked perplexed and waved us through.