First homemade vegan meal

Happy New Year! Well, the day has come. It's January 1st, 2012: the start of my 31-day vegan challenge.

I wanted something special seeing how it's the New Year and all. So I opted for a yummy breakfast: red velvet pancakes.

This is not a vegan recipe. If there's one thing I've noticed from looking over and studying a lot of vegan recipes during my "homework" month, is that they try so hard to overcome the lack of dairy and eggs. All kinds of different flours, sweeteners, texture enhancers.... It occurred to me to start with a different route instead, as part of my experimentation. What if I just use the same recipes I've come to accumulate, know and love, and veganize them, instead of reaching out in vegan websites for every single thing that I am to cook during this month. Will that be enough to make delicious vegan food? I'm about to find out.

This is the red velvet pancakes recipe I used, from allrecipes.com. I did not make that mascarpone spread because I haven't gotten vegan cream cheese yet. I would veganize that with the vegan cream cheese and soy yogurt in lieu of creme fraiche, and vegan cane sugar instead of regular. If I make these again I'll make sure to try that.

As for the veganizing of the pancakes, it was pretty straightforward. White sugar was replaced with vegan cane sugar. The large egg was replaced with Ener-G egg replacer, mixing up one egg's worth. The buttermilk was made the same way you would make it with whole milk if you realized you had no buttermilk around: you add a tablespoon of vinegar to a measuring cup then bring the volume up to 1 cup with plain soy milk. For the creme fraiche, soy yogurt was the substitute, the same way that regular yogurt (or sour cream) can substitute for creme fraiche in the non-vegan world. And finally, Earth Balance vegan butter took the place of regular butter.

And so the cooking started:

Very red.

I tried both brushing some canola oil and vegan butter on the pan. The latter was the best, although I did find it a little salty relative to butter, which isn't salty at all.

Gotta be careful not to burn them! The red coloring threw me off on my first batch. :-)

I found there was really NO texture difference between these and regular pancakes. Since these call for baking powder and baking soda, they fluff up just the same. And the melted butter in the batter made them nice and moist. They weren't hard or too dense or any of those stereotypes that people have against "healthy" baked goods. It was an even swap of vegan ingredients for non-vegan ones. 

As for the syrup, I went with a maple-flavored agave nectar option that I had. I did miss using pure maple syrup. I will definitely go back to that, making sure to get one that has been processed with vegetable oil instead of lard.

A hit, basically. :-)

I was so pleased and happy with this. A successful vegan meal.