The indexes are not 100% complete yet, so some more recipes will appear there once I finish going through the recipes and tagging them appropriately.

Blogging will be resumed in July – we wish you all gentle summer nights with no worries at all!

Anni & Heikki

Writing a vegan blog has become such an important part of our lives that we’d like to take a break from writing down recipes and spread out some love that we’ve been getting from this new social sphere. It’s amazing how many people are actually interested in what we eat, and it’s been great to get to know all the people who’ve been leaving comments or keeping a blog of their own.

We received an Excellence award from Kamutflakegirl a while back, thanks for the honor! We appreciate it a lot, and well, there are so many excellent blogs that it’s hard to decide who to award. After pondering this for a while, we decided to pass the excellence award on to Alice in Veganland, Cybil Jennette from love at first bite, Dreamy from Living Vegan, Sara from Veganvrak, and Emmie from Veg Bitch. Feel free to pass it on if you like, you’re all excellent!

Also, Kittee from Cake maker to the stars just tagged us, and we’re supposed to write five random things about ourselves. Here we go:

1. We just decided to go to Lisbon in June, for 18 days! We have an apartment with a balcony facing South!

2. We are both a little confused about our futures – we don’t know what we want to do when we grow up, other than be together. Maybe we won’t grow up at all.

3. We decided to get rid of our extreme coffee addiction a few months ago, now we only drink coffee less than once a week. We drink tons of tea instead, green tea and black tea and white tea and herbal teas of all kinds.

4. Heikki has a beard and Anni doesn’t. Heikki cut his beard a few weeks ago, but now it’s growing back.

5. We like inventing new words, and then use them abundantly.

Well, we’re not sure how many people haven’t done this randomness thing yet, it’s been around for a while, so maybe we won’t pass it on. But there’s another nice award we just received and will be happy to give out!

Marikki from the Kuusi blog gave us a Blogging with a Purpose award, thanking us for having an interesting Finnish recipe blog. Thanks Marikki! We give this award to five vegan blogs, thanking have cake, will travel!, Seitan is my motor, Lelly’s Vegan Kitchen, the urban vegan and the Conscious Kitchen for sharing their inspiring recipes, photos and thoughts on vegan food. Pass the award on, if you like!

We hope none of you guys’ve been tagged with these before, but if you have, just consider yourselves doubly honored!

Anni & Heikki

Here is a picture of the beans when they are cooking, with a lot of bubbling and steaming going on. After a few minutes, they are already changing color:

And after cooking they have turned into regular beans, innocently green, smothered in garlic and olive oil in the picture:

The first two I made last week for a friend, who celebrated her birthday and other nice things that have happened in her life lately. Here are the raspberry rum cupcakes with raspberry buttercream frosting and non-vegan sprinkles (these were the first sprinkles I have bought in my 10 years of veganism, and I didn’t realize they weren’t vegan until someone in the party reminded me about the possibility… I will learn from my mistakes.):

These were adapted from the Almond Cupcakes recipe in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, I used half spelt flour and added some rum extract and a few frozen raspberries in each cupcake before putting the tray in the oven, and topped them with raspberry buttercream frosting adapted from the same book – I used regular raspberries instead of raspberry syrup, and the pink color came out just perfect.

Here’s what I used for the raspberry frosting:

• 1,2 dl vegetable margarine, in room temperature

• 2,5 dl or more confectioner’s sugar

• 1,5 dl frozen raspberries, defrosted

The margarine has to be warmed to room temperature, otherwise it won’t get fluffy. For this frosting, I only needed the pulp of the raspberries, so I pressed them through a strainer to get rid of the seeds. This should leave some 5 tablespoons full of raspberry pulp. Now, I whipped the margarine until a little fluffy, then spooned in most of the sugar and mixed to form crumbles, poured in raspberry pulp and beat until creamy, and added the rest of the sugar little by little until the consistency was very fluffy.

Here are Mint Chocolate cupcakes, adapted from the Basic Chocolate cupcake recipe in the same cookbook, but I added some crushed mint candy (I used Marianne, hard mint candy with chocolate filling) and some crushed chocolate in the batter. I topped the cupcakes with mint chocolate buttercream frosting, and sprinkled with crushed mint candy. I guess the mint chocolate frosting was basically raspberry frosting with melted chocolate (cooled to room temperature) instead of raspberry pulp, and crushed mint candies added in the end. The green stars are even vegan, I think. These were heavenly.

Last Saturday, I baked raspberry and apple cupcakes for a house warming party, recipe adapted from the Basic Vanilla Cupcakes in the same book, I think I just replaced some of the flour with spelt. I halved the batch, and added some crushed frozen raspberries and rum extract in the other half, and some cubed apples, a few drops of almond extract, and cinnamon in the other half. You can see the raspberry ones in the background (the same frosting as last week’s batch):

The pale-colored topping is Cinnamon Icing from Vegan Cupcakes, with a pinch of nutmeg and a some grated lime peel added, and some grated chocolate on top.