I have made gingerbread houses a handful of times in the past, often with friends as an afternoon activity in the school holidays. I didn’t make one last year as I didn’t get the time to, but thought I’d put in a bit of effort this year to create a modest little home for some gingerbread people.
Baking has always been one of my favourite activities, particularly during the colder months. When I first converted from vegetarian to vegan, the thing I was most concerned about wasn’t cheese, but baking. Can you even make an eggless cake?
A lot of the things I’d learnt about baking over the years, what I’d considered the fundamentals, were suddenly useless in my pursuit to retain my hobby. It was as if the pillars of a building had been taken away and the roof was expected to stay up. Of course, since then, I have learnt a lot about the versatility of plant-based ingredients and that it is very much possible, and not at all difficult, to bake without eggs, or indeed any animal products.
Apparently people really liked my post last week describing my (pretty successful, if you ask me) attempt at making vegan biscotti for the first time, as it’s my most viewed Blogmas post so far! Because of this, I decided to throw another festive recipe at you all and challenge myself to make vegan mince pies – for the very first time. (Anyone seeing the similarities with the biscotti challenge?)
“I think I’ve got biscotti on my sock.”
Needless to say, this was the general mood of my introductory session to vegan biscotti. I’d never even attempted any kind of biscotti before but, oh well, there’s a first time for everything. It was a little sticky, a little messy, but fairly straight forward.
Alys Journals 