Who loves breakfast??? ME, ME, ME I would scream if someone asks. I must say that there is something amazing in the versatility of what is considered ‘acceptable’ in the morning- sweet, savoury, hot, cold, it doesn’t really matter as each culture has a very different interpretation of whats expected as food as first order of the day.
Category: Children
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Mini vegan donuts for little fingers
As a child I used to love donuts. It was by far my favorite after school indulgence and even today I remember the pleasure it brought me to bite into a fluffy warm donut in a cold sunny day, seating out side in a bench on my way back home until a full day at school. That faint smell of cinnamon and powdered sugar on top… what a dreamy treat. -
Natural beauty & skincare products we use at home
‘What natural beauty & skincare products do you use?’ This is a question I get asked quite often. It’s a fair question, because we use mostly (at least within our possibilities) everything organic and as pure as we can get. Most people initially think that maybe the quality or the performance of such items would not be as good as the more commercial counterparts, (more…)
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Vegan Halloween cookies
Fall is here and so is Halloween… the time for scary and (pretty disgusting) looking treats and endless baking afternoons to make enough for the neighborhood kids trick and treating affairs! These vegan Halloween inspired spooky cookies are the best to make with the kids and they are made with unrefined sugars and natural plant colours.
Last year we decorated the front of the house and we had a fair amount of fun doing it. Lots of kids passed by picking up sweets (little did they know that we would be giving them healthy cookies instead of sugar laden sweets! :))
I’d love to share our, I must admit, pretty basic cookie recipe for last year. We simply made gingerbread cookies with scary shapes using cookie cutters, as Ariana was still quite young and this was the best she could do at that time. But this year we are going to build on last year’s recipe using vegan buttercream made with aquafaba, my newest and most loved addition to the kitchen pantry (or fridge!) to decorate our scary looking cookies. This is the cookie cutter set we have bought.
The cookie recipe is a basic sugar cookie (made healthy of course!) but the most fun we have had decorating them.
Basic Sugar Cookie recipe:
Makes 12-14 cookies with Halloween inspired shapes:
2 cups of flour (I used this one)
1/2 cup unrefined caster cane sugar*
1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 homemade aquafaba butter (recipe here or use any vegan butter)
1 tsp vanilla powder
2 tablespoons oat or cashew milk (thick milks work best!)
pinch of saltFirst preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Cream the aquafaba butter together with the caster cane sugar. Mix all dry ingredients together in a bowl and slowly add into the aquafaba sugar paste mixing by hand. It will become kind of like a crumbly mixture, but if you add the milk it should create a dough ball, that keep together and that you can roll out. You can always add a bit more milk if it is not soft enough to roll without it falling apart.
Roll the dough until its about 0.5 cm thick and cut your shapes. Keep rolling the excess dough until you don’t have enough dough left! the last piece can just be made into little balls and press down with the rolling pin to the same thickness as the cookies. Bake for 10-15 minutes until golden on top, let them cool down on a wire tray and decorate!
It is also nice to make these cookies with chocolate flavor by replacing 1/4 cup of the flour for raw chocolate powder.
For the decorations, you will need to have your aquafaba royal icing and natural food colouring ready.
* I make cane caster sugar by blending unrefined caster sugar until a very thin powder.
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Bounty style coconut treats
On Friday afternoons, a group of local parents get together to let the children play and for us all to unwind as a community. For these events, when they are hosted in a private residence instead of the upstairs room at the local pub, I like to bring some healthy treats for the parents and the kids. For the first ever one we had, I made these quick and yummy bounty style coconut treats with Ariana’s help. They were all gone rather quickly and a few mums asked me to share the recipe with them as they were popular with the other kids, so here we are.
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New friendships and children
In the last couple of years, particularly, since the kids came along, I have come to realize the importance of friendship. And I don’t mean the ‘easy kind of like friendship’ we nowadays have with other parents kids at pick up, or with neighbors, I mean the true, hardcore, ‘I am always for you here’ kind of friendship. Those are not easy to come by…
I consider myself lucky, as I do have a good handful of friends that I can count in that category, even now that i am living outside my home country (Spain) or my adopted country (Argentina). These new friends are there for me no matter what, to help, and listen, and also to celebrate. I do feel that, whatever your life situation, it is important to have some of these friends. It can more difficult as we get older to forge true lasting relationships, but I have to say that it is possible. I feel I have made wonderful friends at these ‘pick up’ times at the nursery. Women that I can count on if I am late to stay with my kids, to feed them dinner, to make them feel safe while I get to them. To these women, I thank for helping me to feel reassured that my kids and I are welcome in their homes and their lives. They truly make life easier and my heart warmer.
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Working with concrete for succulent planters
One of the projects Ariana and myself enjoyed the most this summer, was making these super cool concrete planters. It was fun (and easy) from beginning to end- choosing the paper and plastic containers for the shapes, choosing the plants for each, mixing the concrete with water and finally, assembling the whole project together! Oliver just watched us through the whole process highly uninterested, but I am hoping to get him engaged in our craft making soon 🙂
There are different ways to make concrete pieces; you can buy the ready to mix powder, like Breton (which we did on this occasion) or mix the concrete with sand yourself to various proportions.This lat option is certainly the way to go if you are planning to do larger pieces because the other mix would be too expensive. I have been looking for a white coloured concrete for a project I have in mind and it seems Snowcrete is widely available, but regular concrete would do for a grey looking finish.
Making these super cool pots didn’t take long at all (except the waiting time for the concrete to dry!) and it was super easy. I mean, Ariana is 3 and she managed to get them done almost by herself. All you need to do is to choose two containers per pot. The larger one will make the outside of the pot determining both the size and shape of the final product. The smaller one, will set the size of the interior of the pot and that would be the space that you would have for your succulents. We are not leaving a drainage whole, so bear that in mind when choosing the plants to go inside.
Mix your concrete powder with water as specified in the instructions, foil the pots you are going to use to make it easy to remove them once the concrete is set. You will need to oil the inside and bottom of the larger pot and the outside and bottom of the smaller one. Fill the larger pot with the mixture and press down the smaller container inside to create the hole. Clean the top of the pot or flatten the concrete on the surface for an even finish. You will have to weight down the inside pot as it is difficult to keep it down without applying pressure. It is also a good idea to tap the container a few times on a hard surface to help the bubbles to come up making sure the whole pot is even and stronger without any air pockets.
Leave the pot to dry for 24 hours and remove (or peel) away the containers. Fill them with soil and plants and they are ready to decorate your house or to give as a gift to someone else. We made one for us and one for Tia Hele (The kids adoptive auntie here in London). She LOVED it 🙂
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Easy and quick one bowl vegan chocolate chip cookies
Ariana is a big fan of chocolate chip cookies (or should I say of chocolate?) and so is Oliver nowadays, so this recipe has been in development for the last few years. We can always make it with the ingredients available in our pantry, so there are many substitutions possible!
3 cups oats, made into flour in a blender
1 cup coconut oil, no need to wait for it to melt
2 flax eggs (5 tablespoons water mixed with 2 tablespoons flax meal)
1/2 cup unrefined cane caster sugar*
1/4 cup coconut sugar
1/2 tablespoon vanilla powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1 cup (or more) chocolate chips, chunks or desired shape chocolate piecesAdd all ingredients except the chocolate chips, into a mixer or into a bowl and mix by hand until well incorporated. Then add the chocolate chips (recipe for the homemade ones we use is available on the recipe section) or buy them- we have used these before and we liked them.
We sometimes substitute the oats for quinoa flakes, the coconut sugar for unrefined cane sugar, sometimes we don’t use cinnamon, or we use dried fruit instead of chocolate chips and we have even used aquafaba butter (recipe available on archives) instead of the coconut oil with good results. These type of recipes, where ingredients are easily swapped are, in my opinion, the best recipes as you can never find an excuse not to make them! 😉