Vegan Mofo VI- Day 23: My Cups Runneth Over!

I thought I would be really lazy and just make some Peanut Butter Cups today. As much as I love pb and chocolate together I've never made my own pb cups until today. What an experience! There isn't really so much work involved as there is waiting. Some finesse would also be good, but as long as you aren't serving these to anyone too snobbish I don't think they'll care if they look less than perfect. It's the though that counts, right?

The recipe in Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites is meant to yield 12 standard muffin sized pb cups. Because I am a pain in the butt, I chose to use Halloween mini cupcake liners and do smaller pb cups. I thought they would be cuter and hopefully survive longer. I forgot that this meant it would also take twice as long to make them. I should have tried doing regular size first so I would have the basic skills down. I didn't go far enough up the sides so there is a gap on almost all of these. You have to be careful when biting into one since the filling oozes out, not that it's a bad thing, just unexpected. I did wait the full hour before trying them so maybe the pb I used takes longer to set or I just put way too much pb in them. I'll know better for the future, but this was a decent first effort. I'd like to try again with a different peanut butter, maybe a crunchy version!

Vegan Mofo VI- Day 22: Go Bananas!

I slept in again today but managed to have enough time to make waffles and do all my dishes before heading off to work. I was so excited that I was starting to feel better but of course I feel horrible again. Maybe I tried to do too much, or maybe there are just too many yucky germs floating around and they are sticking to me like glue. Why am I up so late? I had to find out who was eliminated first from Drag Race All Stars (not happy!) and I had to wait for my emo stomach to calm down. I seriously have no idea what is going on, but I do not like it at all. Enough about me, onto the waffles!

These are "Banana Split Waffles" from  Hearty Vegan Meals for Monster Appetites, a book I asked for last Christmas and have not cooked from until today, totally blowing it, right? I had to dig out my immersion blender for this and finally open the the package of succanat I specifically bought last time I was at the Adventist store because some recipes in this book called for it. There are so many appealing recipes, I had no idea where to start but a huge pile of bananas gave me a good starting point. I really wanted to make the double batch banana bread, but it calls for more buttery sticks than I can spare right now, so this was the next best way to use up ripe bananas. I had everything else and only needed to get the dried cherries. I would have loved to splurge and buy ice cream and chocolate syrup to pour on top, but they are just not in the budget. Not to worry, these still taste great with your choice of buttery spread and maple syrup. They are also quite filling. I can usually eat 2-3 waffles in a sitting, but today I wasn't sure I'd finish my plate. I'll just try one at a time when I make these again. There might be another recipe from this book later on this week, stay tuned!