Win A Moo Free Chocolate Hamper

Tags

Best Halloween Sweets, Chocolate Week, Competition, Food photography, Moo Free Chocolate, vegan chocolate recipes, Vegan Desserts

It’s National Chocolate Week – as if we needed an excuse! I’ll be featuring my favourite chocolate recipes from the last year and there’s an exciting competition for a Moo Free Chocolate hamper too.

The last weeks have been an amazing whirlwind of magazine deadlines for Vegetarian Living and Viva!Life, Christmas photo shoots and being the official photographer at Vegfest London. I nearly missed my first blog anniversary this Wednesday 🙂
To celebrate I’ll be tempting you with some mouth-watering chocolate recipes from the last 12 months… Will you be able to resist?
Whether you’ve just stumbled across my blog or have been following from day one – it’s lovely to have you here. I hope you’ll stick around for a while and join the fun. (There’s a subscribe button in the top left corner so you’ll always get the latest posts the moment they appear on here!)

Chocolate Cherry Cakes

5-ingredient Chocolate Pots

Rich Chocolate Fudge Cake

Ruby’s Cookie Pie

Viva!’s Chocolate Mousse

 

Are you tempted yet?!?
To celebrate National Chocolate Week and to link in with my BIG vegan Halloween sweet-round up you can win a delicious selection of Moo Free chocolates. Thank you so much to the lovely Moo Free team!

To enter, simply tell me in the comments section how many different flavours of Mini Moo Bars you can get and what your absolute favourite vegan Halloween treat would be. (Click here to help with your answer 🙂 )
The competition will close at midnight on Sunday 26th October and is open to UK residents only.

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If your business could benefit from fabulous meat-free recipes and photographs I’d love to hear from you.
Keep in touch via Twitter (@flavourphotos) or Facebook
and look out for more scrumptious food photography here: www.flavourphotos.com

 

Christmas in August… whatever next?

Tags

Christmas 2014, Christmas shopping, Vegan Food photography, Vegetarian food photography

Do you ever feel annoyed to see the Christmas adverts appear in August? As a food photographer, my life is never quite ‘in season’ either… Did I hear anyone say Valentine’s Day or was that Easter?!

It was my birthday yesterday (yeah!! 🙂 ) and we all went out for a nice Sunday lunch. There was no way you could possibly miss the flyers and special seasonal menus… Christmas must be just around the corner!

As a food photographer, that’s my kind of reality too. While I may find the baubles and tinsel in the shops a bit ‘over the top’ during theses late summer weeks, they are so very welcome in front of my camera. It may sound strange to be shooting fabulous Christmas meals in August or even the healthy post-indulgence New Year’s recipes in September. But how lucky is that? I get to eat more than one Christmas dinner!

These cute mini baubles were the perfect prop for the Vegetarian Society’s Xmas shoot.

Have you spotted any festive ‘early bird’ specials and Season’s Greetings in your local shops? I wonder if you just ignore the hype or whether you feel motivated to get organised. I’d like to share my festive post at Fiesta Friday this week. Can I ask the fab FF crew how you all keep up with visiting the countless lovely blogs? I really want to read each of your posts properly and write a meaningful comment… How does everybody else do it – you’re such a supportive crowd!

Back to festive cheer… so let’s hear who’s bought the first Christmas present this year? Who will be crowned the best ‘Christmas Elf 2014’?

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Keep in touch via Twitter or Facebook
More scrumptious food photography here: www.flavourphotos.com

Chocolate Cherry Cakes

Tags

Chocolate cake, dairy-free, Romantic recipes, Valentines Day, Vegan, Vegetarian, Vegetarian food photography, World Cup 2014

World Cup winners 2014! Unless you managed to hide away under a very thick duvet, could you have possibly missed this?

Germany’s football team is proudly returning home today to show off the trophy to the hundreds of thousands who line the streets of Berlin, celebrating, singing and dancing. I’ve been thinking about a fitting tribute to the team and here’s my ultimate celebration food: World CupCakes
While I’m writing this I’m keeping an eye on the live stream from the Brandenburg Gate, where the atmosphere is simply ELECTRIC! To see the whole world come to Brazil to ‘play together’ seems particularly poignant at a time when thousands are continuing to flee their homes because of war and unrest. I hope some of that spirit and sportsmanship will leave a longer lasting legacy than any trophy ever could.

During the tournament, Alex (my 5 year old) has taken an real shine to Bayern München player Thomas Müller: ‘He’s so cool!’ and ‘He’s just the best, Mummy!’.
And out of the blue he popped his most important question during the World Cup final: ‘Mummy, is Thomas Müller vegan?’

I promised him to look it up online (answer, as far as I can tell, is no). He insisted that I should find out his address so that he can send him a letter ‘because being vegan is sooo much better’. Following in the footsteps of veggie and vegan athletes like Carl Lewis, Ed Moses, Martina Navratilova and the Olympic cycling medalist Lizzie Armitstead? He’s got a point… gotta love the innocence and passion of a five year old!

Chocolate Cherry Cakes with Cream Cheese Icing

The German colours black, red and gold definitely needed to feature in today’s post. There were various ideas, including dark rye bread with red pepper humous and yellow tomatoes…  But I think we’ll stick with scrumptious cupcakes and I hope you’ll approve of my choice 😉

Makes 15

Chocolate cake:
180g self-raising flour
3 tbsp cocoa powder
225g sugar
5 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 tbsp vinegar
275ml water

For the icing:
75g dairy-free cream cheese
225g icing sugar
1 tsp red cabbage powder

30 cherries, half of them stoned
gold sprinkles and edible gold leaf

Preheat the oven to 180˚C.
Mix all dry ingredients for the cake and then slowly blend in the combined liquid ingredients until you have a smooth, runny cake batter. Should you end up with lumps you can give the mix a quick blast with a hand blender.
Line a muffin tray with cupcake cases and place a cherry into each case. Pour in the cake mix until just over half full as these cakes rise quite a bit.
Bake for about 25 minutes, then set aside to cool completely.

In the meantime, combine the cream cheese with the icing sugar and red cabbage juice powder. I really wanted to use a natural food dye in this recipe and I bet you could experiment with very concentrated blueberry or beetroot juice too. Just remember that by adding more liquid you will also need to use more icing sugar.

Pipe the icing on the cakes and add a cherry and golden sprinkles.

For the first time in my life I have experimented with edible gold leaf. It costs a whopping £4 for two tiny sheets but it seems worth the investment for the beautiful celebration cakes below! Wouldn’t they make the most gorgeous dessert for a romantic meal too?
I’m looking forward to bringing these to the 3rd Virtual Vegan Linky Potluck and also to Angie’s super fun Fiesta Friday #25.

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Pancakes, Pfannkuchen and Crêpes…

Tags

Banana Pancake, Breakfast, Crepe, dairy-free, Fasching, Leek, Main course, Mushroom, National Vegetarian Week, Pancake, Pancake Day, Pancake race, Pfannkuchen, Vegan, Vegetarian, Vegetarian Living

Whether you call them pannenkoek, panqueca or krep, there’s no two ways about it… they are a food of many happy memories! Can’t wait to share these two recipes for Pancake Day.

My mum is a fabulous cook and whenever she made Pfannkuchen for my sister and me, she’d be trying hard to keep up with our endless appetite. I can still conjure up the sweet smells in the kitchen and the hissing sound as the pancake batter hit the pan. Whether you have got a sweet tooth or are a lover of all things savoury, I hope you’ll find a recipe to inspire you for Shrove Tuesday?

Creamy Leek and Mushroom Pancakes

This recipe was part of my first Vegetarian Living column. The combination of the mellow sweetness of softened leeks with the crunch of roasted hazelnuts works really well.

Serves 4

For the pancakes:
1 cup soya milk
1 cup flour
1 tsp baking powder
2 tbsp oil
½ tsp sea salt
2 tbsp chopped parsley
vegetable oil

For the filling:
2-3 leeks, cut in slices
3 spring onions, sliced
250g chestnut mushrooms, sliced
2 cloves garlic, crushed
dairy-free cream (e.g. soya or oat cream)
vegetable stock cube or powder
salt and pepper
chopped roasted hazelnuts

Place all pancake ingredients in a large measuring jug and whiz with a handblender until completely smooth. Add a little more milk until you have a runny batter that can easily spread around a frying pan. Use your favourite pan and make 4-6 pancakes. Cover and keep them warm until your filling is ready.

Next, sauté the leeks and spring onions in vegetable oil over a medium heat. You don’t want them to turn brown but go nicely soft and mellow. After about 5-7 minutes add the mushrooms, crushed garlic, salt and pepper. Cover with a lid and keep sautéing over a medium heat until the leek is tender. (Add a little vegetable stock if necessary.) Pour in a generous splash of cream and season to taste.
Spoon some filling onto each pancake, sprinkle with hazelnuts and fold it over.

Patricia’s Breakfast Pancakes

Patricia’s recipe was part of last year’s National Vegetarian Week. It worked out perfectly that I was taking the photos on the actual Pancake Day last year :-)Serves 2

Ingredients

1 mug plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 mug soya milk
1 ripe banana
1 tbsp vegetable oil

Method

1. Mix the plain flour and baking powder in a large bowl.

2. Add the soya milk and a mashed ripe banana. Mix well with a wooden spoon. (I think I added a little extra sugar to this. Sorry, sweet tooth!)

3. Heat the vegetable oil in a frying pan and pour in a quarter of the mixture. When golden on the bottom, turn and cook the other side.

Serve immediately with maple syrup or fruit salad and plain soya yoghurt, soya cream or vanilla vegan ice cream.

The cultural differences around the pre-lent days still make me chuckle a bit. In Germany there’s the biggest, craziest Fashingsparty going on around Shrove Tuesday. There’s fancy dress, processions and oversized smurfs, celebrity and politician lookalikes and other characters on floats dishing out sweets and little toys to the vast audiences. Meanwhile in the UK we mark the day with… oh yes, pancake races like this one in a local town! 😉

Check out these pictures from my home town in Bavaria. What a crazy bunch!I would just love to hear all about your favourite pancake memories and toppings. Are you more in the savoury or in the sweet team – do let me know how you eat yours. Happy flipping!