Filed under: bread pudding, pictures, recipes | Tags: rabbit time, vegan bittersweet chocolate sauce, vegan bread pudding
I apparently have owned adorable wavy ramekins for several years, but only came to know it tonight. The nice thing about this discovery is that I can halve the bread pudding recipe and not gain fourteen pounds in the next week. (Just seven.)
I tucked the bread chunks neatly into the ramekins. They swelled up like jerks in the oven, causing sugary milk to sizzle over the sides onto the oven floor (and the entire house to smell like burning), but the results are cute. I may have contradicted my previous claim about bread pudding being horrifically unphotogenic.
When the puddings were baking, I chopped up a bar of high cocoa content Valrhona chocolate and topped it with a couple of tablespoons of confectioner’s sugar, two pinches of sea salt and a grind of nutmeg, all in a heat-proof bowl. I got out a little saucepan and in it combined half a cup of creamer, a quarter cup of soymilk, teaspoons of vanilla and bourbon and a quarter teaspoon of almond extract. I brought the soymilk mixture to a simmer and poured it over the chocolate. Then I wisked the whole mess together until it emulsified and put it in the fridge to cool.
Once the sauce was done, I tasted it and hated it. (I hate almond extract in pretty much everything.) I will admit my hate was premature in this case. Weird as it was by itself, once it was soaked into the bread pudding, the combination was killer. Killer. Here is a picture of the rabbit making a funny face in front of the ruins of the pudding, to which I had laid waste.
An ongoing project of mine is pumpkin pie. Nevermind the crust; my boyfriend is the pastry maker at present, though that is obviously going to have to change. My obsession, however, has been with the perfect filling.
For a while I used a standard recipe from Martha. I replaced the evaporated milk and cream with soy creamer, used egg replacer for the eggs, and upped the cornstarch slightly. Then I found a sweet old couple at the farmer’s market who sold heirloom and organic cheese pumpkins for a pittance. I started roasting and pureeing the pumpkin myself, and it seemed like a shame to drown that flavor in soy creamer. So I messed around, Test Kitchen-style.
The current iteration goes like this. It tastes good. It is a lot better for you than you suspect when you eat it. But it still drowns that delicate and wonderful roasted pumpkin flavor in one hell of a lot of tofu. I need to fool with it some more. Updates to follow, I promise.
