So, we decided to do an epic eat-athon... Now what?
First thing we decided to tackle was lembas, the elven way bread that is purported to fill the stomach of a man with just a small bite. There are a ton of recipes online for this tasty (or very plain, depending on the recipe) traveling staple. Surprisingly, many of the recipes are vegan as well! (There's a misconception that elves are vegan or vegetarian. In the books it talks about them eating meat.)
I decided to make three different recipes for the three different times we will be eating lembas during our marathon (one time per movie, as it so happens).
The first recipe comes from Vomitingchicken.com (what a name!) This recipe I think would be most in line with an actual recipe for cram. It's also the most simple I've found. To make it vegan, I substituted Earth Balance vegan butter and brown sugar instead of honey. The resulting dough was very sticky and I had trouble rolling it out without it sticking to the pin... Looking back, I would have put the dough between two pieces of wax paper for ease of rolling, but I didn't think of that until about an hour ago. Le sigh.
It looked like shortbread going into the oven and tastes like a not very sweet graham cracker. My parents and I enjoyed the taste of this, as the earth balance is salted and gave a little savory hint to the sweetness. It also smelled fabulous while it was baking.
The second recipe took the longest, but I think it is my favorite out of all three. This came from jetsetfork.com and needed a bit more prep time (I started this one, then made another lembas and cupcakes while it was resting for an hour in the fridge).
Luckily, I had most of the ingredients for this one already, including the gluten free flour mix specified, so my only substitution was vegetable oil instead of coconut oil... Because my dad forgot to pick it up at the store. (BTW my dad is the best for picking up all the strange items we had on the list, I'm sure seeing such an odd variety of items was baffling. Who needs THAT many potatoes, apples, and vegan sausages?)
These took the longest to make, but were well worth it because they taste AMAZING. Like a granola bar was made into bread form. I highly recommend this recipe.
The last lembas recipe I tried was from vanessalyuen.com and was pretty simple. I did make some substitutions: all purpose flour instead of oat flour, maple syrup instead of honey, and vegetable oil instead of coconut oil. Overall, this one was really easy to make and form into little rectangles.
They taste like not too sweet peanut butter cookies and are very dense.
The last bit of baking I did was a dozen vanilla cupcakes (to be eaten every time we need to eat cake!) I used this recipe from lovingitvegan.com but added cranberries on top instead of strawberry icing (since I was bringing some to my grandmother and she's deathly allergic to strawberries). I used vegetable oil instead of canola oil.
These are great! Not too sweet. I will make an icing on Monday right before we eat them.
This is all the baking I've done ahead! On Monday I'll begin cooking in earnest!
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