Chestnut candle refers to the blossom of the horse chestnut tree, that appears briefly in the late Spring. (I missed the photo opportunity this year, hence the daisy.)
The Chestnut Candle seemed like a good name for the kind of wholefood bakery where you might sit down at a big wooden table and enjoy a perfect slice of cake with a mug of coffee or tea.
As this blog evolves, I hope to fill the cake plates to overflowing with all those recipes that have already made it into my stuck-together handwritten recipe books, and others that I discover and develop along the way.
I’ll be posting new recipes regularly. If you’d like to stay in touch and receive a message when a new recipe is posted, please see my contact page.
I began baking, like a lot of people, at a young age: rock buns and fairy cakes, mainly, unless we’re counting tablet and fudge.
Forty-odd years later, having been vegetarian since the age of thirteen and raised my children on a vegetarian diet, I’m in the process of transitioning to a plant-based vegan way of life.
transitioning
A blog about cakes is probably not the place to set out a full-blown manifesto for plant-based eating. What I should say is that I find the trinity of arguments in favour of becoming plant-based pretty compelling, ie: human health, animal welfare, and the environment.
There is a great deal written elsewhere on the web about all three. Despite having read tons of it, I’m not an expert, so I’ll stop there. Since you’ve read past the term ‘plant-based’ in the header, you’re probably familiar with quite a lot of it already anyway.
In some ways I prefer plant-based to vegan – after all, you can live off highly processed nonsense food loaded with additives and never so much as sniff wholegrains, fresh fruit or vegetables and still be vegan. The recipes I will post here favour simple, wholesome ingredients.
That said, I know that the oil, refined flour and sugar used in some recipes would stick in the craw of the plant-based purist, so I’ll tread a wobbly line between the two for now.
I use the word transitioning because, for me, this is definitely a journey, although I know some have made an instant 100% switch and succeeded.
The Vegan Option
Veganism is on the increase, but it’s still very much a minority lifestyle. The days are not long gone, if they’re gone at all, of the single vegetarian option on restaurant menus: macaroni cheese or veggie lasagne in the ‘eighties; later, mushroom risotto or something involving goats’ cheese and peppers.
I also remember people offering to ‘take the bits of meat out’ to make the quiche, or stew, or whatever ‘vegetarian’ (I can’t be the only one who experienced this…?)
Now, there’s quite a lot of choice for vegetarians, but it’s only in the last year or so that I’ve felt confident about finding a vegan take-away sandwich from a mainstream outlet at lunchtime. I guess we’re in the era of the vegan option – falafel wrap, anyone?
Still, progress is progress.
the new normal
Until I started thinking about potentially removing dairy and eggs from my diet, baking ingredients were a straightforward business. With the exception of the odd cake or pastry recipe calling for lard, pretty much everything was within range as a vegetarian baker.
When I began seeking out vegan alternatives, and substituting ingredients in favourite recipes to create plant-based versions, it wasn’t all that difficult to produce decent cakes (there were several disasters, of course). I always had this nagging feeling, though, that I was trying to create a passable vegan copy of something for which there was already an unsurpassable non-vegan archetype.
That’s, understandably, the way we tend to look at vegan baking. We were mostly brought up on eggs and butter and milk, so vegan baking is a departure from the norm. But the ultimate compliment shouldn’t be,
“This is the best vegan [insert name of cake] I’ve ever tasted.”
…as nice as it is to hear that. The ultimate compliment should be,
“This is the best [insert name of cake] I’ve ever tasted.”
ancient and modern
My mini-epiphany (you need one of those to start a blog, don’t you…?) came when I realised that I was using natural ingredients that humans have been eating for as long as or longer than animal-derived ingredients.
While it might not be considered traditional for people born in the second half of the 20th Century to bake a cake with things like flaxseeds, these have been natural ingredients in the human diet for millennia.
Flaxseed was a staple of Greek and Roman civilizations. Chia seeds were part of the Mayan and Aztec diets. Chickpeas, source of the recently discovered vegan wonder-food aquafaba, are one of the oldest cultivated crops, dating back over 7,000 years.
Using these ingredients in baking may be unconventional at the moment, but it’s not weird, it doesn’t run counter to our natural habits, and it’s not about half-baked reproductions of original masterpieces. Our baking ingredients and practices develop all the time. It’s about embracing traditional and often highly nutritious foods in new and creative ways.
an online treasury
I feel very aware that we’re only in the foothills of what will be achieved in terms of vegan baking. Over time, as vegan becomes more mainstream, people will come up with brilliant new cakes and desserts we haven’t even thought of yet.
It’s hard, though, to let go of the things you know and love. I know I still turn to traditional cakes, puddings and biscuits for comfort and sustenance.
So, that’s what this blog is about – making a painless, cheerful transition to a plant-based lifestyle by developing an online collection of tried and trusted recipes for wholesome, vegan versions of the kind of home-baking we (or I, at least) can’t, or don’t want to, live without.
If no-one else reads this blog – a strong possibility unless I can get to grips with things like ‘search engine optimisation’ – it will be an online treasury of recipes and photographs for me and my family, and that will be enough to be going on with.
