A Call to Healthy Kitties Everywhere!

I love dessert and so does my husband. Actually, I sometimes feel that he has a love/hate relationship with dessert. Sometimes he loves it, and sometimes it just makes him feel bad because it doesn't love him back. Once upon a time he was diabetic, and now he is vegan, fit, and happy. I think dessert can remind him of the bad times, and good dessert scares him because he is above all else a foodie that loves good food just for the taste of it.

So one day, I was getting ready to make a batch of cookies and I noticed with great guilt that some of the fruit I bought for us was not as fresh as it could be. Part of that was because I had been making lots of dessert. Both of us love fruit, but love my baking a little more. So I took some nectarines that were slightly soft (but still good) and I decided I could make some cookies with those! I set out to make the other ingredients as healthy as possible. Agave nectar is low on the glycemic index, which means that it does not inter your bloodstream as quickly and 'spike' your blood sugar, so you don't get a heady rush, you get a nice build up.

I want to dedicate this to a kitty, but I don't have any super healthy kitties in my life, so I want to hear from you, the reader! Do you have kitties that exercise with you? Do you have kitties that nibble veggies? Let me know! Send me your kitties stories, pictures, and names and I will enter you in this month's 'Kitty of the Month' contest, where the owner will get goodies!

Jason's Healthy Kitty Cookies

Wet ingredients

3/4 cup agave nectar

1/2 cup maple syrup

1 tablespoon Ener-G egg replacer power MIXED WITH

2 tablespoons of water

1 1/4 cup peach puree (about 4 small peaches or nectarines)

1/2 cup vegan butter, slightly colder than room temperature

Large ingredients

1 tablespoon cinnamon

1 tablespoon xananthan gum

1 1/2 cup gluten free baking mix

2 cups oatmeal

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 cup walnuts, chopped

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a food processor, place your pitted, cleaned peaches. Puree. Add this to your mixing bowl, and combine with agave and maple syrup. In a separate bowl, whisk the ener-G with the water until light and frothy. Add to the syrup puree mixture. Add the butter and mix with a mixer until there are only small chunks of butter left. In a separate bowl, add all the dry ingredients and whisk together so they are blended. Add the dry mixture to the wet mixture, one cup at a time until incorporated. Use a small cookie scoop (about 1 tablespoon, rounded) to scoop the cookies onto the cookie sheets and bake for 12 minutes. Wait for about 5 minutes and remove from cookie sheets. They are great that day but taste even better the next day when served at room temperature.

Lover's Lemon Bundt Cake

Sweets for the sweet!

If you say the title of this blog five times in the mirror, a bad kitty will show up and give you a cupcake! But all Candyman rip offs aside, I thought I would blog in and share what I made for my husband for Valentines. I have an unnatural love of Nordicware’s bundt pans, especially the kitchy ones in cute shapes like castles and bee hives. If they are miniature bundt pans, I am doubly in love. Knowing this, he got me a Nordicware bundt pan that has a dozen roses on it. I am still smiling.

I knew what I wanted to make in my shiny new pan, too! My family has a famous lemon bundt cake that we all love! The only problem is I have not had it in years because it was not vegan and it was definitely not gluten free. So what could I do? I got in the kitchen, changed the ingredients around, and baked these up. The results were so good that two of our non-vegan, gluten loving friends were amazed. One said, “The dough melts in my mouth! That’s never happened before!”

I would like to dedicate this recipe to one of my bad kitties from the past, Lover. Lover was a black tom cat who loved to purr and be petted. Once, when we were moving across country, he and his ‘wife’ cat, Poo Poo escaped into a rest stop. My mother ran through crowds of people and cars shouting, “Lover, Poo Poo! Lover, Poo Poo!” Only later did she realize how embarrassing it really was. She did recover the kitties. I don’t have a picture of him, but I remember him with this great bundt cake.

“Lover’s Lemon Bundt”

WET INGREDIENTS
1 2/3 cup granulated sugar
½ tsp salt
2/3 cups veggie oil
½ cup water
2 tablespoons Ener-G
2 teaspoons lemon extract
1 teaspoon almond extract
2/3 cup lemon juice
2 tablespoons lemon zest

DRY INGREDIENTS
1 cup sorgum flour
1 cup gluten free baking mix (I use Bob’s Red Mill)
½ cup sweet rice flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 tablespoon xananth gum

DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Mix the sugar and salt with the oil until thoroughly combined. In a separate bowl, add the water and Ener-G, whisking together until light and frothy. Add this to the sugar oil mixture. Combine. Add the extracts, the juice and the zest. Combine. In a separate bowl, add all the dry ingredients. Whisk so they are combined and there are no lumps. Add the dry mix to the wet mix, one cup at a time until incorporated. Oil a bundt pan. Pour mixture in, stopping about ¾ of the way (this needs a 12 cup bundt pan, or you can do a smaller one, but you’ll have left over). Place in the oven. Small individual bundts, such as my roses, bake for 20 minutes. Large bundts should cook for about 50 minutes. Stop when a skewer placed in the center comes out mostly clean. Wait to unpan for about 20 minutes, then place a plate over the bundt pan, hold it there, invert the pan so it is on top and the plate beneath, and give a light tap. Congrats! You have a finished pretty bundt cake. On to step two.

THE FROSTING
2 cups powdered sugar
About ½ -1/3 cup lemon juice, until slightly running.

DIRECTIONS
Wait until the cake (or cakes) are cool. Drizzle with frosting. Enjoy!

Welcome to the Bad Kitty Bakery!

Hello Everyone and a Few Notes on Gluten

Hello everyone to the premier blog of the Bad Kitty Bakery! I'm Madelyn, and this blog is a place for me to showcase to die for desserts, that just happen to be vegan, and in almost all cases gluten free. Don’t let the gluten free thing throw you. I promise that you won’t miss it, and in many cases, it actually helps the texture. I know you probably don’t believe me, because I wouldn’t before I had to learn to bake gluten free, but there is an actual scientific reason. You see, gluten is a protein found in wheat and wheat relative flours (rye, spelt, barley, etc…). The protein provides structure, but that structure hardens when it is worked. That is why your cupcakes made with regular flour can turn out like rubber if you over mix them. Trust me, it’s happened to me! But using flours that without gluten means that isn’t an issue.

The aim of this blog is also to showcase bad kitties in all their glory. If you have a bad kitty in your life (or a naughty kitty, or even a good kitty that does funny things) then send me their picture, name, and a description of what they do, and they can get a recipe designed and named after them! If this happens, they will also be entered in the Bad Kitty of the Month contest. The owner gets a special treat of baked goods, and they will be entered in a contest for the Bad Kitty of the Year! The caretaker of that bad kitty will get ‘mad loots’ of baked goods, so please, send away!

Next blog I will start with the recipes. There will be a recipe for lemon pound cake, a picture (because recipes without pictures are the worst!) and some musings on the bad kitty that inspired the recipe. I will include scientific facts to explain some of the items in the recipe. I hope to see you back in a few days!