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Hearty Vegan Soups

Congratulations! You made it to the end of this blog (for now at least.) As a reward, I’m going to share two hearty soup recipes with you that are sure to keep you warm on Easter night.

1. Minestrone

Minestrone soup is one of those things that can easily be made vegan and pretty much anyone can make. It’s the perfect side dish for Easter because it warms you up all while filling you up.

If you’re like me and prefer light dinners though, minestrone soup is the way to go, especially if you spent all of Easter day eating junk.

2. Clam-less Chowder

When I was growing up, I used to love to eat clam chowder. If it’s made well, it’s thick and stuffed with all sorts of good stuff. 

If you’re vegan, this may not be what you’d want to eat because it reminds you of “fishy” food, but your Easter guests would probably love this.

Not only could this easily be mistaken for traditional clam chowder, it’s also really easy to make!

I hope through this blog you find some vegan dishes that inspire you. I’ve been consistently making vegan food for the last three years, so I know what will and won’t work. 

Hopefully you’ve learned a lot and Happy Easter!

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It’s Cake Time

I’m not even going to try and hide it, I love cake and this will probably be my favorite portion of this blog. So without making you wait any longer, I present to you two vegan cakes you can make and eat on Easter.

1. Carrot Cake

I’ve made vegan carrot cake for the last two years for several occasions including Thanksgiving, birthdays and especially on Easter. 

One of my favorite parts about this cake is it has two entire cups of carrots, which is a great way to sneak vegetables into food without young children knowing about it. 

The recipe that’s linked above is the one I use, but I’ve made some minor adjustments that I’ve found that have amplified the taste and made the color better, so here are some of my takeaways.

Instead of flax seed meal, I use applesauce because it’s give the cake better moisture and it also makes it slightly sweeter. Also, I don’t use the frosting this recipe recommends because it’s so horribly high in sugar. Instead, I take two cups of Trader Joe’s chocolate chips and I just slowly melt them in the microwave. I then get a frosting like mixture which I later lather onto the cake.

A piece of the final product should look something like the picture above and there you have it! Super easy and kind of healthy carrot cake.

2. Chocolate Ice Cream Cake

There’s a little back story to this, so I figured I’d share that way you understand my thinking behind why I decided to put together a few recipes to make this possible. 

When my boyfriend turned 21 I wanted to make him something really special because 21 is one of those huge birthdays you have to do something amazing for. So, long story short, because he always loved ice cream cake, I decided to try and make my own version of vegan ice cream cake.

I’m a big fan of minimalism, which is why I love this particular recipe for chocolate cake. In fact, I follow this recipe exactly, minus the frosting part.

For the filling, I take vegan chocolate ice cream and then add in nuts or dried fruit to give it a little extra something. Once it’s mixed, I put it in and layer it as the filling.

For the frosting for this cake, I make my own chocolate caramel sauce. If you need the recipe for it, it’s the same caramel sauce recipe that I used for the walnut clusters in the chocolate post mixed with one cup of Trader Joe’s chocolate chips.

There you have it, my two favorite cakes that can easily be made for Easter dessert! 

A post shared by Sarita (@plantbasedsarita) on Mar 4, 2017 at 6:59am PST

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Vegan Deviled Eggs

You heard that right, vegan deviled eggs is what’s on the menu today. Which might seem completely crazy to most people since eggs are not vegan at all.

However, there is a way to get around this so making you wait any longer, I present to you how to make vegan deviled eggs.

With some potatoes and toppings you can make vegan deviled eggs that are sure to impress your guest.

I haven’t personally ever made vegan deviled eggs, primarily because I never liked hard-boiled eggs, but I think these would come out pretty good. Regular hard-boiled eggs usually don’t taste like much so this probably came out pretty close to the real thing since potatoes and hard-boiled eggs have similar consistencies.

If you’re like me and prefer your potatoes baked, just put some potatoes in the oven and then use the topping that this deviled eggs recipe calls for and eat it like that.

Whether you like deviled eggs or not, this recipe is sure to impress some of your family member, who I’m sure love deviled eggs, on Easter. 

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Sweet Potato & Butternut Squash Mix

Get your notepads out because I’m about to share a family recipe with you and it’s so good you might even mistake it for dessert!

A few years ago my mom figured out how to make these out of this world sweet potato and butternut squash mixture, which we’ll call a mix, since that’s basically what it is.

Ingredients

1 large butternut squash

3 medium sweet potatoes

1 cup of mixed dried fruit

1 cup of nuts

2 tablespoons of organic sugar

1 teaspoon of cinnamon

1 pinch of nutmeg

1 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice

Method

The first thing you’re going to want to do is to put your entire butternut squash in the oven as is. Trust me on this.

You should set the temperature to 400 degree Fahrenheit and let the squash cook until it’s very soft on the inside. (You can find this our by sticking a fork through it and seeing how it feels on the inside.)

While you’re waiting for the squash to cook, boil the sweet potatoes on high until they are very soft.

Once the squash is ready, take out all of the squash and separate it from the seeds. Once you have all of the “meat” of the squash out, put it into medium pot.

Now that the squash is in the pot, add in the sweet potatoes (take off the skin first though) and mix the two together.

Once the mixture is evenly and proportionately mixed, add in the rest of the ingredients and stir.

Enjoy!

While we usually make this around Thanksgiving, this would be a really great recipe to try for Easter because a) it’s orange, which goes with the overall theme and b) it’s a really great side for lunch.

If you want the mix sweeter, do not use sweet potatoes and instead just use the butternut squash with the rest of the ingredients.

I’m glad I got to pass along our little family recipe to you and your family this Easter! 

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Easter Hot Beverages

While my Easter will probably be in 80 degree Fahrenheit weather because I live in Florida, most people celebrate Easter when it’s still chilly outside. Which is why I thought it would be great to do a post on three hot beverages you could make and share on Easter.

1. Apple Cider

There’s something so magical about apple cider, which makes it a perfect hot beverage to make on a chilly Easter night. The apple cider recipe in the video above is raw vegan, meaning it’s not cooked, but you can find several vegan apple cider recipes that are cooked. 

I liked the above recipe a lot though because it doesn’t have any added sugar, which is a huge plus, especially if you’ve been running around all day hyped on sugar.

2. Hot Chocolate

Hot chocolate is definitely a post dessert must on Easter. When I was growing up all of the adults in the family would kick back after a huge Easter dinner and drink cappuccinos, while the kids, and some of the adults even, drank rich hot chocolate.

This recipe is great because it’s easy to make, has decently healthy ingredients for hot chocolate and it’s perfect for a cold night. 

3. Eggnog

Easter revolves around finding eggs, so I couldn’t just leave eggnog out. Although eggnog is traditionally something you would drink around Christmas, why limit yourself when you can make this tasty treat at home all year long!

While I’ve never been a fan of eggnog, a lot of people love it and I could see this as being a nice dessert after a big Easter dinner. It’s rich and creamy with just a little going a long way.

If you’re more of a food-oriented person and don’t care for hot drinks, thank you for bearing with me and I promise, the next blog post is for you.

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Vegan Easter Cookies

While cookies probably aren’t the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of Easter, a lot of people love making homemade Easter cookies, so I’m here to share three really easy vegan Easter cookies that the whole family will love.

1. Sugar Cookies

I’ve made vegan sugar cookies for years now and they’re a perfect treat to bring along to most holiday events. 

If you want to make these specifically for Easter, my recommendation would be to get rabbit and bunny cookie cutters for the Dollar Store or Walmart and use them with your cookies.

Another nice touch you can add is to make homemade food coloring from some of the fruits and vegetables you may have sitting around in your kitchen. While this takes a bit more time, it’s worth it in my opinion because you cut out all of the chemicals that are found in most store bought food coloring.

Also, if you’re short on time and can’t make the frosting from scratch, you could use most Duncan Hines frosting and add food coloring to make the frosting any color you’d like.

2. Classic Chocolate Chip

Chocolate chip cookies are a must for pretty much every holiday. Everyone loves them, they go quickly and they’re easy to give away in to go bags because you don’t have to worry about the frosting getting messed up like with the sugar cookies.

If you wanted to make these a little bit more interesting, you could also add in nuts and dried fruit into the cookies to make them a little fancier.

3. Gingerbread Cookies

While this isn’t something that you’d normally expect to see at Easter, I could see how some people would really love these with some nice hot chocolate. 

Ginger bread cookies are great because they’re light and airy, but at the same time they’re still a sweet cookie.

Although, I’m not a really big fan of gingerbread cookies, my family loves them and they can easily be frosted like the sugar cookies, which is a nice touch.

If you really want to make these taste a little stronger, use real ginger that’s cut into very tiny pieces, instead of using ginger powder. These give it an extra kick and they even make them slightly healthier.

Now that we’ve talked about cookies you can easily make for Easter, let’s talk about some special hot beverages you can make this Easter!

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Vegan Easter Eggs

Most people laugh at the idea of being against buying chicken eggs and painting them as an Easter tradition, but vegans, see it in a different light.

When someone says they’re vegan it means they’re against using animal products completely, not just against eating animal products, which is why a lot of vegans with young children have a hard time with Easter Egg hunts as well as activities that include painting Easter eggs. 

Although I’m focusing more on vegan Easter food with this blog, I thought it was important to talk about alternative Easter eggs since it’s not Easter without a good old fashioned Easter egg hunt!

In this post I’m going to be talking about five nontraditional and vegan ways you can paint or go Easter egg hunting, without eggs from animals.

1. Ceramic Eggs

While these tend to be on the more expensive side, the good thing about them is that they’re made out of durable material so you can keep them for a long time, which is really nice. 

I would think that you might want to use these ceramic eggs if you had older children who were good artists, because if they made something really beautiful, you could keep it for years, which is what I like the best about these.

I would not get these for young children mostly because there are definitely cheaper alternatives than ceramic eggs and young children might break them if they dropped them or threw them. 

2. Wooden Eggs

Wooden Easter eggs are pretty much half of the price of the ceramic eggs and they seem to be just as durable, so that’s definitely a plus.

My only concern with wooden eggs is that they might be a bit more difficult to paint, especially with cheaper paint, since they are originally a golden brown color instead of an egg shell white to begin with like the ceramic eggs.

Economically speaking though, you get the same amount of eggs for half the price, so wooden eggs would be good for vegans on tight budgets. 

3. Paper Mache Eggs

This is probably my favorite vegan Easter egg creation because you actually get to make the egg yourself, which is pretty neat. 

Another really great perk about paper mache eggs are that you can design them much more intricately, they’re not hard to make and they’re also really inexpensive. 

Infants and toddlers probably wouldn’t be able to make this, but young children would probably love making something like this and the best part for them is they can tear it to shreds if they want and it’s not a big deal at all.

4. Plastic Easter Eggs

This is for the busy mom who’s not in the market to spend a huge amount of money. In fact, this is what my mom got for me every year when I was growing up and I loved them! You can get plastic Easter eggs at the Dollar Store and they are reusable, which is another great perk.

Until researching this, I didn’t even know you could could paint these eggs, but in actuality, they come out pretty well with paint and they also can be reused for Easter egg hunts, which makes them overall my favorite, only slightly because this is what I grew up with.

They also already come in a huge array of colors, which is really nice too.

5. Avocados

You probably read that and thought I was crazy, but I’m completely serious. If you have any avocados that are pretty much rotten or too mushy, you can just paint over them and use them as eggs.

While this is kind of a silly example, the avocado is a pretty easy surface to paint on and it’s not too expensive.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a video or pictures of this because the idea is pretty new, but it’s not too difficult to figure out.

You just have to paint over the avocados and then hide them for an Easter egg hunt. 

Hopefully you learned some interesting things about vegan Easter eggs and you have found the method that’s perfect for your family. 

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Traditional Mexican Easter Dishes

When I first came up with the idea for this blog I had a rough time trying to figure out everything I should include. Which is when I turned to some of my friends and asked them what they were interesting in reading about as vegans as well as from people without dietary restrictions. 

My best friend who has a relative who is Mexican, suggested that I make a post about traditional Mexican Easter dishes that could be modified to be vegan, so here we are.

   Molotes/Empanadas

While I am actually the worst person ever to ask about Mexican food, through a quick google search I found that molotes, which are similar to empanadas, are commonly sold during Easter and Christmas as street food. 

While the original recipe calls for meat, you could easily make this vegan by adding soy chorizo or some kind of meat-alternative as the filling. If you aren’t a fan of meat-alternatives, you could also just stuff the inside with hummus and a vegetable mix or something along those lines.

Mexican Wedding Cookies

I can personally say that Mexican wedding cookies are very good. Although I’ve never made them from scratch, a pizza joint close to where I live called Satchel’s Pizza sells them on a regular basis.

While a traditional recipe I found uses eggs and lard, you can easily make this vegan by using chickpea brine, apple sauce or chia seeds as and egg replacement and vegan butter in the place of lard. If you’re not familiar with how to properly substitute the correct ratio of eggs to egg replacements there are several baking charts that explain it at great length. 

If you’re new to vegan baking and aren’t familiar with vegan butter the brands that I often use are Smart Balance or Earth Balance. 

Tres Leches

Growing up in Florida I ate a fair amount of tres leche. In fact, it was probably one of my favorite cakes growing up, which was why I was exciting to share a vegan version of the cake with you.

Your first instinct is probably that it won’t come out quite right since you need condensed milk and other milk-based products to have it nice in creamy, but that’s not true at all.

As stated previously, you can easily substitute the eggs for vegan options such as applesauce, along with other ingredients. Also, in terms of the heavy milk products, you could easily substitute them with full fat coconut cream or something along those lines.

 Worst case scenario, if it’s coming out too watery, you can thicken it up by adding coconut flour and then adjusting it with sugar or maple syrup for the right flavor. 

If you want to impress your family, or feel like trying something new this Easter, give these recipes a try! 

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Vegan Lentil Loaf & Green Bean Casserole

After eating candy and chocolate all morning it’s best to stop around lunch and get some actual nutrition in. Which is why a simple green bean casserole or a nice and compact lentil loaf would both be perfect for a hearty Easter day lunch!

Lentil Loaf

I have made lentil loaf a few times before and it’s perfect for when you have about a small group of people because it is very filling and also just an interesting alternative to traditional meatloaf.

You can use the recipe above, which will give you a pretty hardy loaf along with a nice sauce, or you an use my adapted recipe which isn’t as sweet as this one is.

Ingredients for the Lentil Loaf

1 cup dry of brown lentils 

2 1/2 cups of vegetable broth

3 tablespoons of hummus

1/3 cup of water 

2 tablespoons of grapeseed oil 

3 cloves of garlic

1 onion 

3/4 almond flour or whole wheat flour

1/2 cup of cooked rice

1 teaspoon of curry powder

1/2 teaspoon of cumin

1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder

1/2 teaspoon of grated ginger

Ingredients for the Glaze

6 tablespoons of ketchup

2 tablespoons of maple syrup

2 tablespoons of barbecue sauce

If you’re not a big fan of lentils or loafs, then definitely try making a green bean casserole for the entire family. 

Green Bean Casserole

While green bean casseroles are very popular to bring as a side dish on Thanksgiving, they’d also make a perfect side dish for an Easter lunch. It’s the perfect way to get your daily intake of vegetables in while still eating flavorful and creamy food.

Since I’ve never made green bean casserole before I wasn’t able to have my own take on this recipe. However, the video above shows you how to make some amazing looking casserole and it doesn’t look too complicated to make.

My suggestions for this casserole just from watching the women make it would be that if you’re allergic to gluten, perhaps try making it with ground up uncooked oat meal, or oat flour. 

Also, if you aren’t a fan of fried food, you could probably use boiled onions and then lay a thin layer of hummus over them to give them the rich flavor that fried onions would have. 

While Easter is a time to indulge, it’s important to remember to eat healthy and wholesome food all year round, even on holidays.

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Everything Chocolate Recipes

For most children the first thing that pops into their heads when they hear Easter is chocolate. But for people that are vegan or for children with milk or peanut allergies, the holiday can be slightly daunting if they aren’t prepared.  Which is why I’m here to help with these two classic chocolate candy recipes that won’t have you missing Cadbury Eggs one bit. 

1. Easy Vegan Reese's Peanut Butter Cups

This recipe I’ve used myself on several occasions and it always ends up being a hit. I originally found a version of it three years ago through Fresh Heather’s Youtube video, but I’ve since altered it in order to make it a) serve more people and b) have a better consistency.

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cup of Peanut Butter (you can also sub vegan caramel or fruit if you’d like)

1/4 cup of Maple Syrup

1 1/3  cup of Chocolate Chips (Trader Joe’s sells vegan chocolate chips)

Process:

Melt the chocolate chips and then combine it with the maple syrup and stir until it is a consistent mixture.

Get a muffin tin that will hold eight to nine muffins and put a cupcake liner in each space.

Take the chocolate and maple syrup mixture and spread about a tablespoon into each cupcake liner.

Freeze the cupcake tin for about 30 to 40 minutes in order to get the bottom layer solid.

Bring the cupcake tin back and add half a tablespoon of peanut butter to each cupcake liner.

Freeze the cupcake tin again for another 15 minutes.

Add another tablespoon of the chocolate and maple syrup mixture on top of the two previous layers and evenly spread the top layer on. 

Finally, stick the cupcake tin into the freezer once more for 30 minutes and then serve the peanut butter cups cold.

They should end up looking something like this:

2. Vegan Caramel Walnut Clusters

I’m going to take sole credit for these because I actually came up with the idea for how to make Demet's Turtles one day after work. While this recipe requires a bit more work than the peanut butter cups because you have to make your own caramel, it is completely worth it and everyone I have ever served it to falls head over heels in love with it, regardless if they are vegan or not. 

I’m so passionate about this recipe, I even wrote a piece on it.

Ingredients:

1 cup butter — I used Smart Balance

1 cup chocolate chips; adjust as needed

1 cup walnuts

1 cup coconut sugar

Process:

Chop the walnuts and place them in small circles on a baking tray covered with wax paper or aluminum foil.

Combine the sugar and the butter. You should stir the mixture over the stove on low heat for about 10 minutes or until the mixture becomes thick and forms bubbles. This will be your caramel layer.

Pour the caramel over the walnut clusters. For this to work, make sure the caramel covers all of the walnut clusters.

Microwave the chocolate chips for about a minute and then stir them until they become smooth. Once the chocolate is mixed, layer it over the walnut and caramel clusters.

Put the tray with the chocolates in the freezer for 30 minutes to an hour and then serve them cold.

Hopefully you read this and found some helpful vegan treats you can make for your friends and family this Easter or for any special occasion.