Cook's Illustrated zucchini bread, veganized

People these days have no restraint, it seems, when it comes to naming things as “Ze Best”.

That’s it for today’s lesson, folks. For your homework, head over to Google.com and type “best ever chocolate chip cookies” in the search bar. Use a graduated befuddle-o-meter to measure the general trends of your frustration / confusion / anger levels as you delve deeper and deeper into the black hole that is finding a decent chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Boston cream pie pancakes

Way, way back when I first started this here blog, I talked about some of the first cakes I ever made—one of which was a Boston cream pie. This was also the first time I made my own birthday cake. We now remember it as the beginning of my long-lasting addiction to all things baking as well as my newfound cake snobbery. It’s not scratch-made, by hand, with loving care and local milk? Not going to let that peasantry grace my delicate palate.

Vegan pumpkin spice latte muffins with cashew cream cheese filling and espresso glaze

There is only one thing that’s more important in food blogging than good food, and that thing is good pictures. Obviously. A lot of food blogging seems to be centered around fancy cameras and heavily edited pictures, which is partly why I was so hesitant to start my own food blog. I had convinced myself that if I couldn’t take pictures for shit, I would never amount to anything. No one would read my blog, no matter how hard I worked or how much I wrote or how delicious my recipes were. It would be a very sad affair, overall.

Bacon polenta pancakes with peanut butter caramel

Bacon. Bacon bacon bacon. A love that never ends.

Probably the most monotonous and predictable thing about the internet is its love of bacon. It is literally a salt-cured piece of fat that works well in both sweet and savory contexts and possesses the most satisfying crispiness, thus fitting the basic criteria for deliciousness (as demonstrated in Salt Sugar Fat, which I found is basically a guidebook for making addictive food in the comfort of your own home)—so the fact that millions of people feel the need to worship this meat product both online and IRL is quite unsurprising. I am always shocked when someone says they don’t like bacon. Like my mom. My mom doesn’t like bacon. 

God, what a hipster. source

And, as expected, the most common rebuttal to a vegan or vegetarian diet is simply that. Bacon. Who can live without it? How can you stand to exist without consuming this one godly food?

Fortunately, bacon is probably one of the easiest foods to replicate. As I said, it is, to an untrained palate (like mine), a mass of salt and fat with a smoky flavor and pleasant crunch. Well damn if I can find something that is not dead animal flesh and possesses one of those attributes. 

Damn! source

The vegan Elvis sandwich

Hey folks! All negative four of you! Are you a human being? Have you been reading my shitty little blog? If so, you may have deduced a curious and suspicion-raising pattern—

¡ veganism !

Cue Jaws theme song.

All of the recipes I have posted thus far are completely free of animal products, and as such it is a completely reasonable to make the assumption that I, Baby June, am a vegan myself. If you made that assumption, congratulations. You possess the power of logic.

But that assumption is incorrect.

I am not a vegan.

Cue Jaws theme song, again.

I have, however, made an outright statement that I am underage. Therefore, I am financially dependent on my parents and can’t very well go out and buy myself a hummus wrap—partly due to my lack of money, partly due to that fact that because we are stereotypical suburbanites, it is quite difficult to get to a supermarket without a car. In these exotic parts, driver’s license + money = freedom. Or at least self-sufficiency.

And as such I am forced to depend on my parents for all of my basic needs, from food to shelter to food—and hot damn, my parents do not support veganism one bit. Not even vegetarianism. Admittedly, my mother buys soy milk for the protein content and will occasionally allow me a bag of those magical chia seeds from Trader Joe’s (as she sometimes puts those in her morning oatmeal). But ask for a block of tofu, and I will be on my knees begging before my wish is granted. Let us avoid the subject of nutritional yeast—or *gasp* processed substitutes—in this post so your appetite remains intact. 

Pumpkin spice latte cupcakes

Condensed nonfat milk, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, annatto (a coloring agent), natural and artificial flavor, caramel color, salt, potassium sorbate (a preservative).

Brewed fresh with the blood of angry vegans. source

Didn’t recognize those ingredients? Not surprised. Those are the mysterious components of a pumpkin spice syrup sold by Starbucks, the maker of the legendary Pumpkin Spice Latte. Who knows what spices and synthetic chemicals and cocaine extracts fall under the category of “natural and artificial flavors”? What could possibly explain the lack of pumpkin and the presence of “annatto”, an inexpensive, saffron-esque food coloring agent derived from the seeds of the annatto tree, not to mention the enigmatic “caramel color” found on so many food labels?

Well, the question of pumpkin’s absence is an easy one. Anyone who has tried plain pumpkin puree—whether fresh or canned—will know that unaccompanied, the stuff is fucking nasty. It begs to be roasted with olive oil and rosemary, at the very least, or perhaps stirred into a curry. But pumpkins true claim to fame can be found around Thanksgiving and Christmas, when grandmothers and teenage rebels everywhere hit the kitchens to whip up their goddamn definitive pumpkin pie recipes, either dumped from a can into a Pillsbury crust or cooked slowly, from scratch, with the tender care of a pastry chef. Despite pumpkin’s reputation as a pie stable, there is literally no natural sweetness present in the fruit—two measly grams of sugar per cup—so one must dump gallons of sugar into the pie along with butter and eggs and other such things in order for the dessert to be even remotely palatable.

Do you like pancakes?

Here’s a culinary mystery if there ever was one: why, exactly, do we eat cake for breakfast?

Not literal cake; just cake-like items, like pancakes (lightly sweetened cakes cooked in a fry pan and then drenched in maple syrup), waffles (similar, but with a higher fat content to ensure crispiness), French toast (batter-coated slices of bread which are fried and, of course, drenched in maple syrup), and more. The sugar isn’t limited to these weekend specialties, either. Breakfast cereals, like cocoa puffs and the legendary Oreo-O’s. 

Okay, that's it. I'm moving to Korea. source