Happy New Year! Kitchen redo, a fun birthday cake, and another disaster

It took me long enough.... Anyway, here's what's new in my world- or at least in my kitchen.
I realize this has nothing to do with food, but it's where the "magic" happens so I'm adding this bit. We are starting a kitchen remodel! When we bought this house I was 6 months pregnant and didn't have the time or energy to even think about tearing stuff apart. Now that the baby is 4 months old and sleeping a little better I have decided I cannot go on with a grey and pastel pink flowery print wallpapered kitchen (seriously what were they thinking???) with a "lovely" pink faux marble  linoleum (gag!).
SO....now every second I get in the kitchen, while waiting for my veggies or popcorn in the microwave, while having a beer after the kids are asleep (I find that beer makes it more fun), or waiting for my son to finish his snack, I find myself ripping off random pieces of wallpaper. It's quite amusing and a great stress reliever- at least it was until we found that they had pasted the bottom layer to bare, un-primed wall(that's right, folks...two layers of tacky wallpapery goodness. I wish I could meet whoever lived here before us so I can ask them what the hell they were thinking). Once I get all the wallpaper off, hubs has to fix the gouges and surface mess ups and prime and then I plan to paint the walls a nice neutral beige with a faux parchment finish. That's as far as I have gotten with the planning.

As for cooking news, Winter is "birthday season" in our family with my husband celebrating December 14th, my oldest son on December 27th, and my birthday on January 8th. When I asked my husband what kind of cake he wanted he jokingly said "Princess Peach from Super Mario Bros.". Now how could I say no to that??? I asked him if he was serious and he said he didn't care so I decided to do it. I searched the internet for ideas and found some awesome ones on cake central. Imagine his parents' faces when I brought this out for my husband's 27th birthday:

That's my son's hand there "stealing" some icing. The cake was vegan vanilla with "butter" cream icing and blackberry preserve filling, but the fondant was regular non-vegan fondant. I have much to learn in the art of vegan cake decorating...but that's a topic for another blog entry. It was very good, and we all had a laugh.

Ok so now the part with the disaster...
Last Monday, I was baking banana muffins with my son and decided to try my hand at vegan biscotti. I absolutely ADORE biscotti but was sad to see that every recipe I came across had eggs in it. Not just one or two, mind you, but 3 or 4! Ouch! So I decided to try making it with Ener-G egg replacer. Using the logic that egg replacer would replace eggs in any recipe (hey it said so on the box!) I made my dough. The egg replacer didn't have nearly the amount of moisture needed to get the dough to hold together so I added some almond milk. It just didn't seem quite "right". The dough went from overly floury to feeling like freshly mixed cement. Still I continued. I rolled out the dough logs, baked, sliced, and baked again. What I ended up with was more reminiscent of those concrete things in parking lots that mark the parking spaces...whatever they're called. I don't know why I attempted it, but I took a bite- or tried to- and nearly broke a tooth. Needless to say I threw them out and begrudgingly re-made the dough using eggs. FAIL!!!! Like I said, I have a lot to learn about vegan baking; which takes me to my last bit of news. For Christmas, my amazing sister bought me "The Joys of Vegan Baking". It has loads of awesome recipes for breads, desserts, muffins...just about anything you can think of, along with lots of good advice on substitutions. I can't wait to try out some of those recipes!
I think I'll start with the rice pudding...I'll let you know how it goes.