CANCELLED: VegMel Picnic!

OH NO WE ARE CANCELLING THIS EVENT. Please stand by for rescheduling. Sorry for the short notice! 

!!

VEGMEL IS FIVE. It happened about two weeks ago, so five and a bit, but birthdays can last for ages.

To celebrate, as we do every year, we are having a picnic!

Come for vegan noms, friendly vego faces, and to talk crap. We'll be in Princes Park, up near the bowls club and the pond. Bring a vegan plate and a picnic blanket, or just yourself.

This event is open to all, not just bloggers. It's always fun! (I promise)

Sunday, October 5
1pm - 4pm
Princes Park
near the bowls club

Facebook event

Black Forest Cheezecake + a Birthday Picnic

Recently Planet Vegmel turned three! To celebrate there was a picnic at the Edinburgh Gardens, as well as our favourite new tradition of making a zine. This year's zine features secrets of not the inner North, and you should all download it!

I made the super awesome vausage rolls because I really wanted Wendy to try them (having spent the last six months in Beijing talking them up to her), but this meant bringing a gluteny savoury that K couldn't eat! To compensate, I went to extra special effort with my sweets contribution: vegan, gluten-free black forest cheezecake.


This recipe was inspired by a piece of cake I had at the Heavenly Plate on a recent trip to Perth which was amazing and I was so excited to try making some sort of black forest cheezecake myself. This version isn't quite right, there are several changes I have in mind for the next iteration, but for a first attempt (and my first cheezecake in over a year) it was not bad at all.

I used the triple threat chocolate cheesecake in My Sweet Vegan as inspiration/guidance for proportions.

black forest cheezecake

ingredients

1 packet of chocolate biscuits (I used the leda tim tam substitutes)
third of a cup of sugar (I used a mix of white and coconut sugars)
two tablespoons margarine


3 tubs of vegan cream cheese (approx 700g)
300g silken tofu
300g dark chocolate
three quarters of a cup of white sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
shake of salt

a can of berries, preferably cherries but mixed will do
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon cornstarch
quarter cup sugar
extra chocolate for drizzling

method

Crush the biscuits, mix with the third of a cup of sugar and the margarine. Add some extra chocolate in the form of cocoa if you like. Press into a lined 22 cm cheesecake or springform pan for a thin crust, or a smaller pan for a slightly thicker crust.

Mix together the cream cheese, tofu, vanilla extract, salt and the three quarter cup of sugar until smooth. Melt the chocolate and combine through until looking delightfully brown. Pour carefully into pan on top of crust, and drop the pan a time or two to smooth it out if necessary. Bake at 175C for about 50 minutes.

After it has cooled (I usually do this overnight), over heat bring together the can of berries (mostly drained, but with a little of the syrup), the cornstarch and the lemon juice with the remaining sugar. Stir over heat until it's come together like a jam, and let cool a bit. Then pour it over the cake. When this has cooled a little more, melt the remaining chocolate and drizzle it over. Serve and eat it, it's so good.

Changes I would like to make in the future: an extra berry layer on top of the base; a thicker base (maybe half again); something "white creamish" like a real black forest cake (maybe a white chocolate tofu layer); fresh cherries on top.

going wandering

Later today I get on a plane and by almost this time tomorrow I will have moved to China, where I will be living for about the next twelve months. I will still be posting lots of food to this blog, but my posts to Planet VegMel will be filtered so only thinky posts and Melbourne posts appear. If you'd like to follow my continuing food adventures, until I come home you'll have to do it separate from the Planet.

Also I have a blog specifically for my China adventure, Song of the Travelling Penguin. It's a tumblr, which you can just add to your RSS reader if you don't like tumblrs. I've enabled disqus so you can even leave me comments if you want! There are no posts there yet because I haven't left, but stand by!

Anyway. I love you Melbourne, I'll see you all again soon.

planet vegmel birthday potluck + blog event part ii

It was Planet VegMel's birthday! So there was a birthday picnic at Edinburgh Gardens, and the weather was beautiful. I took a whole bunch of photos at the picnic, if you'd like to see them you can check them out at my flickr. Cindy has also done a bit of a round up post!

There were zines (which you can download here)



and badges



and there was lots of food!



For drinks, we started with chamomile lemon iced tea, with maple ice cubes, made by K; and a mango lasso made by the Veganator.

Michael made potato chickpea enchiladas, originally seen on veganise this; Emilly made an eggplant salad; and I made the quinoa avocado salad that has been remixed by many VegMelers.

Toby experimented with tempeh bacon, remixed from Where's the Beef. This was probably my highlight of the picnic, I totally recommend it! Also involving tempeh was Em's gado gado.

In news of other remixes, Carla brought along mock crab cakes, remixed from Cindy and Michael; and Mel made tofu quiches, originally seen at Vicki Vegan and Green Gourmet Giraffe.

Danni made sundried tomato bread and pumpkin + miso muffins (remixes from non-VegMel blogs).



For sweets, Cindy and Michael made PB & choc sandwiches, based on peanut butter alligators and chocolate ganache from Sugarspoons.

K made ginger ripple cake, based on a recipe by the Veganator; Mel made apricot delight, remixed from Green Gourmet Giraffe; and Em made Turkish Truffles, a remix of Mel's rum balls. I remixed chocolate caramel slice, from Johanna's original recipe.

In original recipes, Vicki posted about her peanut butter balls; Johanna brought blueberry cake pops (and they were so amazing); and Carla delighted us with lamingtons.

And that was the potluck, but not the end of the birthday:




two more submissions for that recipe sounds very familiar… previous entries can be found here.

Cindy and Michael remixed a beetroot chocolate cake, originally from the Fairest Feed.

Like Cindy and Michael and myself, Mel remixed Toby's Singapore noodles, a delicious noodle treat.

PICNIC DAY

Good Morning Vegetarian Melbourne! I hope to see you in a few hours at the Planet VegMel Birthday Picnic! There will be badges and a zine, and lots of delicious food! from 1pm at the Edinburgh Gardens, near the bandstand. Bring a picnic blanket and a (vegan, maybe gluten-free) plate!

"that recipe seems very familiar..." blog event update

Just a reminder that Planet VegMel's 2nd anniversary is this week! It officially falls on the 14th of September, giving you just two days to get your remixes in for the original anniversary deadline! On Wednesday I'll be making a round-up of all the recipes that have been posted.

However, there is the Birthday Picnic coming up on Sunday the 18th, and I know many VegMel bloggers are planning to remix something for that picnic. With that in mind, there will be a part two post for these remixes about a week after the picnic, giving everyone time to blog about their remix.

So don't worry about desperately needing to meet this Wednesday's deadline! There is still a lovely amount of time left to remix something from another blogger.