This post goes out to @carisma77 as it was inspired by her Apple CookiesClick and see the post. It is also inspired by @sirenahippie who has encouraged me in my initial posts and is vegan.
This is a long post with two recipe's.
The first is standard hummus. Easy to make but hard to make just right.
The second item is made using the leftover water from cooking the chickpeas in the hummus. The leftover water is called Aqua Faba and it can be used as an egg substitute. What did I make? I'm going to call it Manna Cake. Why Manna? Because "Manna" meant "What is it?" in the bible and that very much suits this cake.
It is a cake made using chickpeas, soy beans, banana peel, apple peel, blueberry, flour, sugar, lemon and oil. Except it doesn't really fit the mold for cake, loaf or square. At the end of the day I don't really know how to classify it! Maybe someone better versed in cooking can come up with a name. Hopefully something other than disaster 😁
Part #1 : Hummus
Now hummus is actually very simple to make. You just cook up some chickpeas (garbanzo beans) and blend it together with lemon juice, cumin, salt, oil, lemon juice, garlic and sesame seeds. It might sound simple but getting the blend just right has taken me a long time to get down!
Let's start with some dried chickpeas.
I used 3/4 cup of 218g of dried beans ($0.47)
Take the beans and then cook them in a slow cooker at high heat for 6 hours. Of course cover with enough water to make sure they don't dry out. Please don't try cooking dry beans, it just won't work. Yes, when I tried to make hummus the first time I didn't now the beans had to be cooked and almost broke the blender in the process (I'm not a good cook))
Once the beans are cooked
Once the beans are cooked it is time to get the hummus ready to go. Now we won't be using the liquid the beans were cooked in for the hummus. Most people would just discard the water down the sink. However I will be using that later to make the Vegan Manna Cake.
So... The beans get drained
The water water goes in the fridge and the chickpeas cool down while I get everything else prepped for the hummus.
Ingredients (hummus)
- 2/3 cup of Lemon Juice ($.52)
- 2/3 cup of Canola Oil ($.48)
- 1tbsp of garlic powder (or 5-6 cloves of fresh garlic) ($.13)
- 1tbsp of cumin ($.10)
- pinch of salt (1/4 tsp?) (negigible)
- 3/4 cup of sesame seeds. ($1.73)
Total cost : $3.42 / 1000g
Now some people use tahini paste to make their hummus. Great idea because it is a lot easier that way. However, Tahini paste is just sesame seeds turned into a paste so I make my own. Easy. Put Sesame seeds, oil, lemon juice and spices into the blender and let it do its thing for a while. Result: blended sesame seeds in something resembling a paste.
Step by Step:
Measure 3/4 cup of sesame seeds
Measure 2/3 cup of Canola oil and Lemon Juice
Then throw them into the blender and blend until pureed
You might need to pause every now and then to do some spatula work to move the splattered seeds from the side of the blender back to the bottom.
Then its time for spices
1/2 tablespoonful of garlic powder
A heaping tablespoonful of cumin
And a pinch of salt added to the blender
Followed by all the cooked chickpeas.
Now its time to blend it all together.
Now I wish I could just say hit blend and its all good to go in a minute. However that would be an outright lie. It will be way too thick to blend nicely. You will likely get something that looks like this:
Now some people may like chunky hummus but they certainly won't like it that chunky! So its time to add water little by little until you get a nice smooth consistency (or maybe a little chunky if you like). For me that means about 3/4 cup of water in a blender on puree for about 2 minutes as I like it very smooth.
However, I've also had 1/2 cup of water for 1 minute and that was also quite tasty.
SIDE NOTE: Some people take the skin off the chickpeas before making the hummus saying it makes a smoother blend. I've tried and it is way too much work in my opinion. I just let the blender do its work and that is good enough for me.!
Final Product
When it is smooth but still holds its form (don't want it runny) then its ready to go. Notice the waves in the blender (not a smooth top). Its nice when it holds its form a bit but not super thick and chunky,
Now its time to spoon it into a holding container and into the fridge.
Now I did weigh it all and I got just slightly over 1000g of hummus from the recipe. Compared to store bought on sale:
I made about $11 worth of hummus for a total of $3.42 a savings of about 70%
Part #2 : Manna Cake
Now that the hummus is ready its time to go back to the water left over from cooking the Chickpeas. Did you know that it can be used as an egg substitute in baking? In Vegan cooking it is known as Aqua Faba and it works as a great emulsifier between oil and water which is what the egg normally does in baking. Yes, the aqua faba also adds some structure to the baking as well.
Now my original idea was to take @carisma77 recipe and turn it into a vegan cake.
However, I wanted to make some substitutions to her recipe. She used apple bits for her cookie and discarded the apple peel. I wanted to make sure to use the peel. In addition I decided to use some banana peel as well. I had some left over from eating bananas so why not add a banana flavour as well? She used rasins which are fine but I don't care for the texture and I had some dried blueberries so I figured I'd use those instead. As for the texture? Banana peel, apple peel and dried blueberries have awful texture....but turn them into powder and they add all the flavour without affecting the texture of the cake!
Also, cake is very low in protein so I decided to add some Okara flour that I had left over from when I made soy milk. You can check out that recipe here.
This is the dried Okara (soybean pulp) before I blended into flour.
Of course using eggs isn't vegan friendly so that got turned into the Aqua Faba from the chickpeas. What did ChatGPT give me as a recipe?
If you only have 35g of okara and you want to use it in your vegan cake recipe, you can adjust the flour amounts accordingly. Here’s how you could modify the recipe to incorporate the available okara:
Ingredients:
2 dried apple peels, powdered
2 dried banana peels, powdered
Dried blueberries, powdered
3 tablespoons of aqua faba (as a substitute for eggs)
100 grams of canola oil (instead of butter)
100 grams of sugar
310 grams of all-purpose wheat flour (subtract the 35g of okara from the total flour required, making it 275 grams of flour)
1.5 teaspoon of baking powder
2 teaspoons of cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon of salt
Juice of a lemon
With that I got to work.
Make Banana Peel Powder.
- Wash then peel banana (cutting off the ends)
- Place in Dehydrator
- When fully dry place in blender and make powder.
(oops didn't take pictures of the dried and powdered peel...but it works the same as the apples).
Dried apple peels
- Wash and peel apple
- Put peels in dehydrator
- Place dried peels in blender and make powder.
Should look similar to banana peels
The Blueberries are no different.
Same procedure except I dried these blueberries years ago. I just found them sitting in the cupboard so I decided to use them.
Where to go from here?
Now that all the fruits and okara are powdered its time to get all the more traditional ingredients ready to go!
That means all the dry ingredients go into one bowl and all the wet ingredients in the other.
Dry ingredients
fruit and okara powder
Flour
Sugar
Baking Powder
- Cinnamon
Use a whisk and mix it all up then put it aside.
Now for the wet ingredients:
Oil
Lemon Juice
Aqua Faba
As you can see they don't really mix well (oil and water). But take a whisk and mix for a short time and you get a nice emulsion.
Now this is where things went wrong
What should happen next? Easy. Mix the liquid and dry ingredients gently and them put into the oven to bake.
Sounds like a great idea except when I tried that I got a dry mess than couldn't be formed into anything.
So, I doubled up on the amount of oil, vinegar and aqua faba and ended up with this:
It was very dry and crumbly. Maybe..it could have been turned into a cookie but it looked too dry for even that.
Time to innovate:
I decided to add a cup of water and see what happened.
It came out pretty thick but it did turn into a batter of sorts.
I decided to throw it into the oven at 325F for 35min and see what happened
It came out as sort of a loaf.
The knife is there because I wanted to do the "done" test. Unfortunately because it was such a dry loaf it came out clean even when it wasn't ready to go. I let it cool, Tried to get a slice and got a gooey mess.
It was a tasty, gooey mess so I put it back into the over for another half hour to see if I could get an edible loaf out of this.
After another 45min at 325F
Not what I hoped for.
I wanted either a cake or a loaf. I got some very tasty bits of something. Too crumby to be called a cake. Not dense enough to be called a loaf.
I was able to cut them into something vaguely resembling a square. I enjoyed them so did my mother in law. As for my son (the true taste test) well, he doesn't get home for another half hour or so.
Oh yeah...
Nico really enjoyed it even if the consistency was off.
End results
At the end of the day the Hummus came out really well.
The Manna cake came out very tasty but with very poor consistency. Next time I think it would do much better in a shallow tray at a higher heat but for this time...well, certainly edible even if it looks awful :)
Thanks for dropping by for a recipe that didn't quite go as planned.