Hello friends, hope you all had a wonderful Christmas, happy New Year and a lovely Pongal! I know that I went missing again! As I have mentioned before I’m trying to cut back on baking to get back on a healthy lifestyle. I have to do this because I completely lack self control when it comes to sweets. So I have decided to cut it at the source itself! But don’t worry guys, I will keep updating here at least once a week and more often at VegCorner.com.

During Christmastime I got an order to bake some cupcakes. Initially I was requested to make egg free red velvet cupcakes but I told them that I haven’t tried it so far and will stick to vanilla and chocolate itself. Actually I have been avoiding the red velvet cupcakes all these days because I’m not comfortable using food colors and that too this particular recipe uses so much of it. Also it is quite difficult to find a vegetarian red food color. But being the baking enthusiast that I am, I did not want to miss the opportunity to try something new. So I started searching the web for a vegan red velvet cupcake recipe and found this in Food.com. This recipe is all over the internet and supposedly has featured in Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World too. This recipe is quite similar to the vegan chocolate cake recipe I have posted earlier, except that it does not use as much cocoa powder. The cupcakes were crimson in color instead of bright red more like beet cupcakes. When I try this recipe the next time for my family I’m going to use pureed beets instead of the food color.

It’s Christmastime, that part of the year I’m eagerly waiting for, because now I have a reason to bake a lot. Over the year I keep bookmarking recipes under the category “Christmas”, usually big batch cookies, so that I can bake it and share with friends, neighbors and others in the community. This year I’m a bit late though. So far I have baked only this big batch oatmeal raisin cookies and I don’t know if I have enough time to make a cookie assortment platter. I have been getting requests for gingerbread man cookies and other things. I really wish I can get to it.

This cookie recipe is a mix of two recipes; my earlier recipe for big batch chocolate chip cookies and this big batch oatmeal raisin cookies. My son’s Hindi class friends were having a “end of the year” party and his school “winter break” party was also coming up, so I wanted to bake a big batch. These two parties were a week apart, so I decided to freeze about 2 dozen cookies for the latter one. See my notes to know how you can freeze the dough and bake fresh cookies just when you want it. I made it nut free (and of course egg-free too) because of the nut allergies, but would definitely suggest adding nuts if you can. At first I wanted to make it just oatmeal-raisin, but you can’t go wrong with chocolate chips with the kids, so decided to go for it. This cookie recipe has room for a lot of changes. If I had M&M’s (Smarties/Gems) with me, I would have added that instead of the chocolate chips. You could also get just the red and green M&M’s and make it all Christmassy!

A couple of days back I stumbled upon Vegetarian Times and I have been bookmarking their recipes like crazy. They have so many interesting baking and cooking recipes. I baked these vegan chocolate cookies following their recipe but making some slight changes. The cookies turned out very good and got me a lot of compliments from everybody who tasted it including my son’s school principal and vice principal.

This recipe is close to my heart for another reason too. My little one spoke a new word when he saw the cookies. He said he wanted it (kaavala in Telugu which means ‘want‘). It was so cute. He kept repeating it again and again. I don’t know how he picked up that word and now he is telling the same whenever he sees us eating something or when he wants something.

Finally I baked some muffins after a long break. All these days something was stopping me from getting into the kitchen for baking. But now that I have baked these double chocolate muffins, I have sort of got into the baking mood and all I can think of now is what can I bake next. For me baking is addictive, once I start it there is no stopping. The only bad thing about this is that I will start packing pounds eating all of it. Already the 2 months vacation in India, Navarathiri and Diwali celebrations has sent the scales tipping way more than it should be. I have to find some way to enjoy baking and also not to gain weight. Any suggestions?

We are also super excited about our first recipe video ever. Hope you all like it. The credit goes to my husband for shooting, editing and all the other technical aspects which goes into it. As always we are open to any constructive comments about the video, so that we can do better in our next attempts.

I found this recipe for double chocolate muffins here a long time back. Maybe even a year or so. Finally got a chance to bake it yesterday. The secret ingredient in this muffin recipe is the Fiber One original bran cereal. It has about 13gms fiber in a 1/2 cup serving and zero sugar. I don’t like this cereal all by itself, so I mix it with some other cereal. So if you too don’t like a particular cereal then you should be using it up by preparing these delicious double chocolate muffins. You will hardly notice it.

Happy Deepavali dear friends. Hope you are all having a good time. I managed to make a couple of sweets and snacks this time more than I used to make earlier, because my eldest son has started showing interest in Indian food after our recent trip to Chennai.

I haven’t started baking anything since I came back from India, which is exactly a month now. I was planning to bake a cake for my husband’s birthday but couldn’t do it with preparations for Deepavali and my youngest was down with ear infection etc. Hopefully I can start it from next month onwards. So until then here is Vegan Cornmeal Raspberry Muffins recipe which I had tried a couple of months back.

I was doing a pantry/fridge audit before leaving to India and found some butter, dates and candied fruit left unused. I didn’t want to leave it behind for another 2 months. So while scouring through my recipe bookmarks I found this fruitcake bars recipe from my favorite recipe source, which perfectly matched my ingredients list. Baking and taking/sending something to India has become a tradition, just like we get something from there. I decided to bake these bars just a day before our scheduled trip so that it will keep good for a couple of days after reaching there.

Hi friends, hope you all had a wonderful summer. I’m back from India after almost 2 months of vacation. We went to celebrate the little one’s first birthday. Fortunately everything went on very smoothly this time unlike the last visit where my eldest fell sick and it was very scary especially with the swine flu scare at that time. After this visit my eldest has picked up a lot of Tamil and these days he is easily switching between Telugu and Tamil. Initially I had planned to post recipes from there regularly but with a busy schedule I wasn’t able to do that even though I had a couple of recipes lined up.

I baked these brownies long back for a get together here in Canada. I bought the brownie mix in Costco. It’s the huge pack. The instructions in the package were given for two 9×13 inch pan and three 8 inch pans. Since I wanted lot more brownies I used a bigger pan which I got from a restaurant supply store.

Overripe bananas is not at all a problem in our house. In fact I deliberately leave some bananas to become mushy to bake my family’s favorite vegan banana bread and chocolate banana cake. This time I wanted to try something little different as I had some leftover strawberries too. The strawberries were not enough to make something just out of it. So I went to my favorite website and found this recipe for some gorgeous strawberry banana muffins. I didn’t think twice before deciding to bake it because I knew that it will definitely be good and sure it was. With some more sugar, the muffins would have been just perfect.

When I posted this eggless vanilla cupcake recipe a few weeks back, I was being asked if it could be baked without the egg replacer powder. I suggested to increase the quantity of baking powder to substitute EnerG. Some did it and got good results and some didn’t. I too made some changes to that recipe to bake it without EnerG but did not get satisfactory results. The cupcakes did not turn out as good as the ones with Ener-G. So I was looking for another eggless vanilla cake recipe which can be baked with simple ingredients and landed on this one. I have come across this recipe before and somehow didn’t get a chance to try it until recently. Since the visitors’ request for a simple eggless cake was becoming more frequent I decided to give it a try and I would say that I was not disappointed at all. It was not as fluffy and airy as the cupcakes but was definitely a decent recipe.

After going through the reviews of the original recipe I have made a couple of changes to make it better. The only other thing I would like to try the next time is to use cake flour instead of all purpose flour. I think that particular variation will give a lighter texture to the cake. So do try it when you get a chance.

Shortbread is a type of unleavened cookie, which means that baking powder, baking soda, even eggs is not used while baking these cookies. These cookies are crumbly and this texture is made possible because of the high fat content of the butter used. I found this recipe for cranberry shortbread cookies in Jill Snider’s Cookies. I have tried a couple of recipes from that book and all of them have turned out very good. This shortbread recipe is my most favorite in that book. Hopefully I get a chance to try the other recipes I have bookmarked too.

I had to bake a big batch of cookies for a get-together and I was so glad that I chose this recipe. I made few changes based on the tips suggested in the original recipe. Dried cranberries and white chocolate chips were used in the recipe and the author had suggested that dried blueberries and semi sweet chocolate chips can also be used. While going through the procedure I got another idea. I decided to halve the dough, mix in cranberries and milk chocolate chips to one part and blueberries and semi sweet chocolate chips to the other half. I had to bake another batch too and for that I used diced apricots and milk chocolate chips. These shortbread cookies were a huge hit in the party.