Vegan MoFo, Pre-K Style!

Today I volunteered with the pre-kindergarden kids at a local elementary school as part

of their Community Helpers Program. I made about six dozen pumpkin shaped sugar cookies and four different colors of icing at home, all vegan of course. I also picked up some chocolate chips, gum drops, raisins, and different colored sprinkles to decorate

the cookies with.

There were three tables of children, so I gave each table four different colors of icing in piping bags, a bowl of raisins, chocolate chips, gum drops, and some sprinkles. I gave each child one large pumpkin cookie and three small ones. I showed them a quick example of how to use the piping bag and then let them go to town with their own creativity. The teachers and I supervised the process and help pass the piping bags and sprinkles around. Surprisingly there wasn't any fighting over supplies. The kids shared everything, helped each other out, and had a blast. I was very impressed at how well behaved they were.

I'm not sure about the proper etiquette of posting pictures of children online without their parents permission, so to be safe, I just put black bars to hide their identity. It kinda makes me laugh, like it's a collage of pre-k criminals. ;)

Vegan MoFo Pre-Kindergarden Style!

This little girl told me in great detail what she is going to be for Halloween, a Spider Witch!

In case you are wondering what a Spider Witch is, "she is a very scary witch who has a very scary pet spider that crawls up her arm... very very scary and spooky!"

This kid cracked me up with all the icing on his face.

Vegan Sugar Cookies are kid approved!

Icing... nom, nom, nom

I made a cookie collage of some of their work.

It makes me smile and wonder what my cookies would have looked like at this age, I'm thinking they would have been a beautiful disaster, just like these!

My favorite part of the day was when the kids surprised me with drawings of cats that they made for me for my birthday, which is Sunday. It totally made my day, the drawings are so cute. I can't wait to share them with you, but I need some time to scan them all, so hopefully I'll have them up for yall to see in a day or two.

Today was definitely a day to remember. :)

Have you ever done food projects with children?

And hey, while you're here, why not follow me... I'll follow you back. =D

When life gives you 20 lbs of blueberries, make EVERYTHING!

In my last post I talked about my 3 day blueberry picking extravaganza, where I picked a total of 20 pounds (let me be fair... Loukas picked 3 of the 20 pounds) of mouth watering blueberries... That's ALLOT of berries!  And even though I do enjoy eating fresh blueberries by the handfuls, I also enjoy playing with recipes, so here are a few blueberry inspired things I whipped up this past week. :)

Fluffy Lemon Blueberry Cookies!

I used my friends awesome recipe for Fluffy Lemon Cookies,

but added a handful of blueberries to the batter. :)

They were SUPER awesome. You definitely should try out her recipe!

Mini Blueberry Donuts!

For this recipe, I adapted Lauren Ulm's donut recipe from her awesome book,

Vegan Yum Yum, for which I am a proud owner of.

If you don't have the book, you can find her recipe here.

I basically followed her recipe with the exception of halving it (so I could make sure it would actually work with the blueberries), adding about 1/4 cup of purred fresh blueberries to the batter (i pureed them in my magic bullet real fast like), added a bit more sugar and baking powder, omitted the nutmeg and cinnamon, and added more flour until the consistency was right. I just kinda went with it.

For the icing I used a little bit of pureed blueberries mixed with powdered sugar and a dash of vanilla extract until it was smooth and not to runny. It dried and hardened up nicely.

I was a little bit more nervous with this recipe, not knowing what pureed blueberries would do to the batter. But SCORE! it was a win win for all involved.

Blueberry Pancakes!

When I asked the question, "What should I do with 20 pounds of blueberries?",

one person said i should make 40 pounds of pancakes!!!

I heard you, and I'm working on it! :)

For the pancakes, I used Colleen Patrick-Goudreau's recipe from her book, The Joy of Vegan Baking. It's my "go to" pancake recipe. I just added a handful of blueberries to the batter and some on the top after they were cooked. It's so freakin easy and they taste awesome, you will wonder why eggs were ever used in pancakes in the first place.

This is a great recipe to pass along to Omnivore friends. :)

That concludes one week of cooking with blueberries. But I'm not done yet!

I still have visions of blueberry ice cream and pie dancing in my head.

It's time for me to get off of this computer and make a big ol blueberry smoothie... YUM!

Thanks for stopping by!

~amber :)