Hamburger Cupcakes

Apparently my pumpkin ice cream photos weren't very appetizing, so I apologize to those of you who I turned off by them - hopefully you'll get over my bad lighting and lack of skills and brave the world of frozen pumpkin goodness!
These cute little cupcakes (don't worry, they are vegan despite the name!) seemed like perfect bake sale fodder, and although I wasn't able to be present and don't know how well they sold, no one called me to come pick them back up.
I don't have a recipe exactly, so I'll call it a method instead...

Method for Hamburger Cupcakes

batter for 1 batch of vanilla cupcakes

sesame seeds
batter for 1/2 batch of chocolate cupcakes
frosting dyed red and yellow (if you have more time, you could do green as well)

1. Divide the batters into cupcake tins. Sprinkle the vanilla batter with sesame seeds.
2. Cook according to recipe directions.
3. Let cool on a tray. Once cool (actually let them cool though - if you are impatient like me, the icing will melt and they won't cut smoothly), cut all the cupcakes in half. Place half of a chocolate cupcake, topped with a generous squiggle of red and yellow icing (use a flat tip to make lettuce if you have green icing), between bottom and top vanilla cupcake halves.
4. Violá! Cute, simple hamburger cupcakes.

Pumpkin Pie...Vegan Ice Cream?

I was completely unaware of the fact that, somewhere deep in the bowels of our slightly cluttered basement, lay an ice cream maker.
I had considered getting myself one as a birthday present (perhaps I could've disguised it as a present for my sister), imagining all the delicious vegan ice cream I could make. Trader Joe's has a good solid chocolate soy ice cream, but just chocolate, even with peanut butter sauce or cocoa powder dusted on top, gets a little boring. Ideas popped into my head as I sat in the cole in Zaragoza...chai, lemon basil, chocolate peanut butter, chili chocolate or peanut butter curry, salted caramel...and then I read the NYTimes article about a specialty ice cream shop in San Francisco and even more fantasies danced into my brain: bourbon cornflake, salt and pepper, carrot mango...and then my sister asked me, "Wanna make ice cream?"
"We have an ice cream maker?!" came my astonished reply.
Turns out, we did. And my sister pulled a box of vegan MimicCreme out of the fridge. MimicCreme is a cashew- and almond-based vegan cream substitute that works surprisingly well. Our first recipe was simple: 1 cup frozen strawberries blended with 1 cup sweentened heavy "cream" and churned for 20 minutes before an overnight freeze. It was good, but didn't have quite enough flavor or body for me.
So when I was looking up vegan ice cream recipes on Hannah Kaminsky's blog, a flavor I hadn't even considered stopped me in my tracks: pumpkin pie ice cream.
As a child, I never liked pumpkin pie. It seemed cold and slimy and squash-y - I loved my vegetables, but you could keep them out of my desserts. However, this fall in Spain, my friends' pining for pumpkin pie inspired me to make one from scratch in my host mother's kitchen. And I realized that I loved the warmly spiced pie, even when it involved boiling the pumpkin and mashing the fruit by hand! (Pumpkin pie perhaps sounds more appealing to the 5-year-old me when pumpkin is called by its true botanical classification, a fruit.) After searching all over Zaragoza for dried and powdered ginger, the pie was rewardingly delicious.

My American pie in Spain. ahhh, seeing her plates makes me miss my host mother! These were probably the most colorful thing in her apartment...

So I fell in love with an American food in Spain, and so I reinvented it as a summer dessert.
The recipe is another easy one, but yields a soft and smooth ice cream that fills the mouth with flavor from the first bite to the last. The pumpkin's earthy flavor comes first, followed by a sweet spiciness, the cinnamon and ginger blending with the brown sugar. As you dig your next spoonful, it's as though you've just had a bite of pumpkin pie...but you didn't need to have Thanksgiving as an excuse, and the oven stayed turned off.
The perfect summer reincarnation of pumpkin pie!!
Here's the recipe:

Pumpkin Pie Ice Cream

1 15-ounce can of pure pumpkin purée
the now-empty pumpkin can filled to half-an-inch below the top with sweentened MimicCreme (the original recipe called for a 14-ounce can of coconut milk)
3/4 cup, more or less, brown sugar
2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice
1/2 teaspoon salt

1. Combine all ingredients in a blender or food processor until smooth.
2. Chill ingredients if not already cool.
3. Freeze and churn in ice cream maker according to manufacturer's instructions.
4. Transfer to an airtight container and freeze for a few hours until scoopable.

Cherry Corn Muffins

I don't quite know where the recipe ran off to, but I think it came from modifying one of Hannah Kaminsky's in the cookbook My Sweet Vegan. I headed over to the strawberry field about a month ago with the best intentions of picking a quart or two, but the fruit looked sparse and overtaken by weeds - yet another short season, victim to the terrible heat and humidity this year. The only things thriving are the tobacco fields.
However, on the cart amongst the already-picked strawberries were some crisp and shiny local cherries. They weren't the big sweet kind from the supermarket, but they looked irresistible. I had seen some gorgeous photographs of corn muffins with cherries perched on top the other day, so I cannot claim the idea as my own, but I did create the recipe myself: after pitting a cup or so of cherries by hand and folding them into the batter, I spooned the muffin tins full and placed a perfect cherry in the center of each soon-to-be muffin.
They came out of the oven looking cuter than ever. Om nom nom.

Tea Party

I was in the mood for a wee bit of whimsy. And nothing seemed to have the potential to satisfy that better than a tea party. With summery print dresses and big hats, and typical English tea food of course.
Two dilemnas, however, soon presented themselves. First, I have never been to an English tea and hence have no idea what true tea party victuals are. Also, the day turned out to be sweltering, much too hot for tea.
The easy solution to the former was a varied selection of iced teas: my mother's "famous" iced black tea with fresh mint and lemon; cranberry white tea from Trader Joe's; and a chilled soy rooibos vanilla latte.
The latter was resolved with a google search and some blatant disregard for tradition. Rhubarb scones made their way onto the menu based on a great photo at my favorite food-porn website, and the rhubarb in the fridge calling to be used. Muffins had to make an appearance, and my mother's blueberry muffins are also quite famous amongst my friends, so they were casted to make the cameo.
I put in a couple of nods to real English teas with some cute cucumber sandwiches and Battenburg cake. Apparently cucumber sandwiches were a sign of high society and wealth, the idea being that poorer diners wouldn't be able to eat such nutrition- and protein-lacking food. That made those sound appetizing. I did manage to give them an exciting twist by putting basil leaves on either side of the cucumber (a flavorful vegan substitution for the butter, whose purpose was the keep the bread from getting soggy) and using a heart-shaped cookie cutter...though of course everything that emerges from my kitchen is baked with love!
The Battenburg cake was intense. To make it, I divided an 8-inch square bake pan in half with aluminum foil, and dyed half of a batch of vanilla cake batter pink and the other half yellow. After baking, these were each cut in half for four rectangular prisms, two pink and two yellow. I learned after putting layers of rolled-by-hand marzipan (I suggest buying the prerolled kind!!) through the cake and around the outside that technically apricot jam is used for the inside - oh well, we were all marzipan lovers anyhow!!
My marzipan ran out about 3/4 of the way through covering the outside of the cake, and I switched to another package which ended up being a different shade of white - alas!! The miss-matched ordeal was covered successfully in a thin layer of white icing, all the better to cover up the cake until the first cut when all my friends had arrived - what a wonderful, colorful, delicious surprise!