Friday, November 12, 2010

Waiting for the snow


I have never been so ready for winter. I know, I always duck when I say that. But living here my whole life, I know I'd miss the cold and the snow if I moved somewhere warm. My dad packed up everything and moved himself, my mother, and their business out to Hawaii after the Halloween blizzard of '91, declaring that "This will be my last Minnesota winter." Well, he was right, sort of. He retired to his hometown of Valley City, North Dakota, which is not Minnesota, but may as well be. At least Minneapolis has city-run snowplows. Also, driving down to the Cities for holidays kind of puts him back into Minnesota Winter territory.



Shannon also picked tonight's recipe. A very snowy-evening kind of dessert. The original recipe, from Bon Appetit, calls for an obscene amount of eggs. It's supposed to be light, puffy, and soufflé-like. I tried. I whipped silken tofu in a frozen bowl with frozen beaters. I added agar. Powdered sugar. It wasn't going to happen. Instead, I focused on making the pudding taste rich and wonderful, and stopped worrying about being some sort of vegan meringue pioneer.

sweetpotatopudding 001

The pudding is pretty close to the real recipe as far as ingredients go (minus the eggs), with a tofu/Silk Nog/agar/almond extract mixture folded in. The topping is pecans, Earth Balance, brown sugar, gingersnaps, and pumpkin pie spice. The ginger-orange marmalade I used has big pieces of orange zest, which really adds to it. It came out fluffier than I'd expected, which was a nice surprise. In future attempts, I'll add a little cardamom. Because my mom would have.

2 comments:

Allysia said...

Ha ha! It looks like that once a year or so here in Saskatchewan. :) And we never got "snow days" off from school, even in the worst of it!

Gilding Lilies said...

This sure looks and sounds good. The topping especially looks yummy.
I'm doing Vegan MoFo on my blog too, and I'm trying to visit as many fellow MoFoer's as possible. I'm so glad I discovered your blog, it's wonderful!