Please be mine, vegan Valentine

Well, this week was Valentine's day and it was extra sweet, even without the candies and heart-shaped box of chocolates. For starters, I just have to say that I love my Mom! She's been my Valentine for 28 years. Being my first Valentine's Day as a vegan, she gave me a vegan chocolate chip cookie and a gift card to Whole Foods (and some sweet smelling soaps). I mean, how awesome is that? And let me tell you, I don't know how Whole Foods does it but that cookie was awesome! I even had to ask my mom if she was sure she bought the right cookie. She did... and now, a few weeks into leaning into this new way of life, being able to taste how good eating with compassion can be, I'm not surprised the cookie was that good!

Inspired by this beyond-good baked treat, I decided to bake something myself. Think vegans can't eat cupcakes? Think again, my friend. Come to find out, not only can vegans eat cupcakes, but they can eat truly delectable cupcakes. The recipe was simple and sweet. I found it in Skinny Bitch: Ultimate Everyday Cookbook: Crazy Delicious Recipes that Are Good to the Earth and Great for Your Bod by Kim Barnouin. This is an AWESOME book by the way. If you are thinking of going vegan but are overwhelmed at all by what you need in your house and want easy recipes, get this one! She spells it all out for you and let me just tell you, her cupcake recipe is a good one! Here it is.  If you want the frosting recipe, buy the book!  And remember, the frosting is actually much thicker after refrigerating, which is not reflected in this picture. (This is a scrolling link by the way, so feel free to scroll up and down for a bigger preview of this book.)

And here is how mine came out. The icing looks a bit runny here. It is. I found out that you need to refrigerate the icing for a couple hours before piling it on. But everything came out good. They were moist and perfectly sweet. Slightly pink from the fresh strawberries that are in the batter! The silken tofu is a bit strange, not too appetizing to look at. I definitely had my doubts when making these but they really surpassed my expectations. Oh, and let me save you some time in the sweetener aisle of Whole Foods. Evaporated cane sugar is crystallized cane sugar. I was looking for a liquid and spent many, many minutes pouring over all the different sweeteners. So once I decided to just take a chance a buy the crystallized cane sugar in a bag, I had the option of regular cane sugar, organic cane sugar, or vegan cane sugar. The packaging offered no explanation. Not knowing what to do I just went for the vegan bag... made sense to me, even though I have no idea what makes sugar vegan. Well, now I know. According to Whole Foods, vegan cane sugar is made without the process of bone char making it 100% suitable for vegetarians and vegans. Ok, creepy! I'm sure your next question is, what is bone char? Bone char, made from the bones of cows, is at times used to whiten sugar. Some sugar companies use it in filters to decolorize their sugar. Other types of filters involve granular carbon or an ion exchange system rather than bone char. Supermarket brands of sugar buy their sugar from several different refineries, so there is no way of knowing whether it is vegan at any given time.

I have also been reading Veganist by Kathy Freston.  I'm only four chapters in right now but I can definitely tell you, this is a must-read!  She gives you plenty of great reasons to go vegan as well as stories from others about why and how they changed their lives.  One of the points she makes very early on is so simple, so logical, yet so powerful.  The human body is not designed to consume animal products.  For starters, our teeth are short and dull, not long an sharp like carnivorous animals in the wild.  Our mouths were not made for chewing flesh.  We also don't have claws to tear through meat.  Our fingers are more appropriately suited for picking berries and things of that nature.  Our digestive systems don't even have the enzymes to digest raw meats and our intestinal tract is long and winding.  Meat-eating animals have a very short and straight colon designed to move meat in and out of the body quickly.  And this is only stating the obvious.  There are so many more reasons to lean into veganism.  Kathy uses the term lean to suggest that you don't have to go-vegan or go-home, but to just slowly change small things.  Maybe start with giving up meat and then slowly phase out the dairy.  It's not about being miserable and trying to change 100% right off the bat.  It's about educating yourself on how to best take care of your body to get the most out of life, while dignifying the lives of animals.  Anyway, the point is, it's a great book.  The health benefits alone are enough to at least consider changing.

Until next time... here's a little something to make you laugh.