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I made a lot of vegan baked goods during the last week of the institute. Vegan baking can be a bit tricky if you’re trying to figure out egg substitutes yourself, so I rely on the pros to do the guess work for me. I trust vegan chef and cookbook author Isa Chandra Moskowitz the most. Her stuff is always amazing. The brownies came from her cookbook Veganomicon (http://www.theppk.com/nomicon.html) and the cupcakes came from her bestseller Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World (http://www.theppk.com/vegancupcakes.html) If you’re looking for a cheap and wonderful dessert cookbook, pick this one up. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Here is the recipe for the famous Mucho Margarita Cupcakes (http://www.food.com/recipe/Mucho-Margarita-Cupcakes-Vegan-311158). I left the tequila out of the frosting, but it really gives these a wonderful flavor. If you serve these the same day as you bake them, the cupcakes will stick to the paper. Make them a day ahead, and then frost them a few hours before serving. This recipe makes 12 cupcakes and a whole ton of frosting, so you can double the cupcake recipe and keep the frosting recipe the same for a good cupcake/frosting ratio.

The second recipe was the Fudgy Wudgy Blueberry Brownies (http://www.food.com/recipe/Fudgy-Wudgy-Blueberry-Brownies-285543) I bought Smuckers’ Blueberry Spreadable Fruit, which still has some whole blueberries in it, so I just ran the preserves through a food processor before adding them to the recipe. You could modify these by using different fruit; I friend of mine made these with cherries instead, and they were great too.

I also made Very Vanilla Raisin Bread from the American Vegan Kitchen cookbook (http://www.amazon.com/American-Vegan-Kitchen-Tamasin-Noyes/dp/0980013119) I couldn’t find the recipe online, but if you’d like it, send me an email, and I’ll pass it along.

So here is just how big of a procrastinator that I am. . . I watched Biggest Loser Marathon on New Year’s Day. I was intrigued. In March I bought a book about exercise and recipe plus snippets of the losers. I finally opened the book in June right before we started class. I made a recipe for class. Now I must start the exercise part. It’s out there now so I guess I will start tonight!

Recipe for Biggest Loser Muffins
Banana Berry Muffins
1 ½ cups unprocessed wheat bran or oat bran
1 cup white whole wheat flour
2 tablespoons ground flax seed
1 ¼ teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon salt
¾ cup unsweetened vanilla almond milk or fat free milk
¼ cup agave nectar or dark honey
2 ripe med. Bananas, mashed with a fork
1 large egg
2 tablespoon olive oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup fresh or frozen blueberries
½ cup pitted chopped prunes

Position a rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 400°. Lightly coat a nonstick 12 cup muffin pan with cooking oil spray.

In a medium bowl, combine dry ingredients. Set aside. In another medium bowl, or a blender combine the milk, honey, bananas, egg, oil and vanilla until smooth.

Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and pour 1/3 of the liquid ingredients. Using a spoon, stir until smooth. Add the remaining liquid mixture and stir just until combined. Add the blueberries and prunes; if desired: stir again, but do not overmix.

Spoon ¼ cup batter into each cup. Bake for about 14 minutes, or until the tops spring back when pressed gently in the centers. Do not overbake. Cool in the pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes before removing the muffins from the pan. Serve warm, or cool completely on the rack.

One muffin per serving: 140 calories, 4 g protein, 25 g carbs, 4 g fat, 20 mg cholestrol, 6 g fiber, 170 mg sodium

**my notes- I found White Whole wheat flour at Jerry’s IGA Round Barn. It is in the health food section. It is totally expensive around $8.00 for a bag. Flaxseed Meal is in the cereal section of all the local stores in Champaign, I added almond extract to my fat free milk and I used light honey not agave or dark honey. I never follow the recipe exactly so I added oatmeal in the place of unprocessed bran.

My food obsession this summer is guacamole.

Preparing guacamole provides just the right amount of culinary challenge for me (aka, very little), yet it’s a flexible dish that allows for some creativity.  As I was hunting for a recipe that I would use as the basis for experimentation, I ran across a few that go too far afield.  Grapes?  In my guac?  No way.

I’ve been pleased with http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/guacamole-recipe/index.html Alton Brown’s recipe, even though I can’t stand him as a personality on his Food Network show.  I’ve made the recipe six times now, and I’ll offer these reflections:

Part of the fun of making guacamole is the avacado ripeness challenge.  This is not a problem if you’re guac-ing for home consumption, but if you’re planning to take it somewhere, you need to be strategic.  If you have a few days, get the avacados while they’re still relatively hard and stick them in a brown paper bag for ripening.  If you’re on a tighter schedule, you may need to go to multiple stores until you find some that are soft enough to work with right away.

Even with the cayenne, this recipe is on the mild side.  I finely dice a seeded serrano pepper and add it with the other solid ingredients.  The heats of the two different peppers layer nicely, and the serrano adds more fresh flavor as well.

There is no substitute for roma tomatoes.  Their meatiness adds body that contrasts to the chopped onions, and their relative lack of liquid keeps things from getting to thin.  Even when I patted dry some regular tomatoes before chopping them, I wasn’t happy with the result.