Tonight I was left alone in the kitchen and things went kinda wrong! First of all when I got home I decided to use up the rest of the mock pork seitan with a nice salad. I thought frying it with a sprinkling of Chinese Five Spice was going to be good... but it was actually disgusting! I've heard wonderful things about this spice, so I don't know if I've used it incorrectly, but it's meant to be nice on chips and wedges and to flavour stir fries, so I don't know if I just hate it altogether, or if I just used it in the wrong manner. It was WAY to cinnamonny/clovey for me... don't get me wrong, I LOVE cinnamon, but this did NOT go well with the salad at all. I was quite miffed that I actually managed to ruin a perfectly good meal.
Then later on this evening I got inspired by
Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar to make their
Peanut Butter Blondies. Everything was going swimmingly until I left them unattended, deciding that the full 25 mins at 200C would be fine, seeing as our oven is pretty dire... so as you can see, my blondies are not so much blondies, but more like a brownie! :( The boy loved them though, they still managed to taste good and soft on the inside. Next time I'll know what to do, to make them more aesthetically pleasing!
Maybe a bit of hoisin sauce mixed up with pork would work giving a chinese flavour but not so overpowering. I use the Japanese 7 spice for wedges which is a totally different flavour - orange peel, black, white and toasted sesame seeds, cayenne, ginger, Szechuan pepper and nori.
ReplyDeleteThose brownies still look yummy. My friend made some the other week using that recipe and they were great. She also made the magical coconut cookie bars which were amazing, almost fudge like.
Ah they were ok, I could have done a lot better. I also added white sugar instead of brown as there was only a tiny bit of brown left in the cupboard! Next time I'll make sure they are amazing and EXACTLY like in the book. I can't be going around giving this lovely book such bad press with my horrible burnt blondies!! ;)
ReplyDeleteYour Seven Spice sounds MUCH nicer than the five spice. I'll keep my eyes open for that one. I'd normally just fry up the seitan in some teriyaki sauce or sweet chilli, I just wanted to be experimental and try out the new spice. Oh well that's what you get with experimenting, either you love it or you hate it... but when you find something you love it's really worth it :)
Getting so excited about baking recently as I love cakes, so it's good to know exactly what goes into them. I'm going to take a trip to Ikea soon and get some cool cake tins and utensils. I got some cookie cutters from there a while ago that I still need to use!