My First Adventure in Baking Vegan

Baking is one of my favorite stress relievers. I love to turn on some Frank Sinatra tunes, put my apron on, and bake for my family and friends. One of my favorite blogs, Oh She Glows, always has delicious looking vegan baking recipes, but I've been scared to dive in to the world of vegan baking. I'm not vegan, but I'm intrigued by eating vegan every now and then.

My favorite apron was at school, but I love my
yellow tie dyed CHWC apron too!

Since I only had my Italian paper to turn in but all of my friends still had more finals to go, and I had 2 extremely ripe bananas, I decided to make banana bread...always a crowd pleaser! Since I'm going through so many changes right now with finishing college and moving to Chicago soon, I decided now was as good a time as any to try out a new activity too, vegan baking :)

I found a recipe online that seemed to be easy and that I had the majority of the ingredients for. All I had to do was buy some applesauce, and I was set. I made a few changes to the recipe, using all applesauce in place of the oil, half molasses/half maple syrup because the molasses was sooooo slow coming out of the bottle and I was being impatient, and then added some chocolate chips for good measure. Yes, I know this means it wasn't technically vegan, but oh well...it was close!

Slow as molasses...

Not quite vegan with the chocolate chips, but close!

The batter was darker than banana bread usually is, due to the molasses, but it was so delicious! Whenever the batter tastes good, I'm usually pretty confident the end product will taste good too, so I was feeling pretty good about my baking experiment.

After editing my Italian paper and submitting it aka FINISHING COLLEGE, the bread was done baking, and I was extremely excited to try a piece. It was a bit denser and chewier than other banana breads I've made, but it was so delicious that it didn't really matter.

So delicious!

I cut up the rest of the loaf and wrapped up pieces for my friends who all loved it too. I was so happy that my first vegan baking adventure was a success! Hopefully there will be more yummy vegan baked goods in my future!


In other news...I completed another must on every senior's bucket list and joined the Mug Club yesterday :)