easy vegan recipes

When I quit coffee, I felt so much better after only a few days (if you want more information on that, click here). But I was feeling a little lost without a comforting warm drink to start my day off with. So I started drinking this hot cacao with maca root. (Cacao is just the raw form of cocoa. Personally, it tastes equally chocolatey to me, but feel free to use cocoa if you prefer!)

This version of hot cacao has maca root, which is a type of natural stress-reliever known as an adaptogen. I like to drink it in a hot beverage like hot cacao because I personally find the maca root more effective when it's heated slightly.

A few weeks ago, I woke up with three words in my head: cookie butter frosting. I'm not saying that God herself tasked me with making a vegan recipe for cake frosting for you. But I'm also not saying that she didn't.

For those of you who don't know, I used to sell cupcakes many years ago. So veganizing my cupcake recipes has been on my to-do list for a while. But cookie butter frosting wasn't ever on my radar. I've seen some recipes for traditional (non-vegan) cookie butter frosting, but so far I haven't seen any vegan ones!

One of my favorite flavor combinations is chocolate and peanut butter. Since I don't eat Reese's peanut butter cups anymore, I have to get my fix from other treats. Fortunately, peanut butter is a good vegan protein source. So with this recipe, I can have my flavors and get my protein too! (Feel free to substitute out the chocolate chips for nuts or dried fruit if chocolate's not your thing).

Recently I wrote about vegan protein and getting enough of each amino acid. If you haven't seen that post, you can find it here. Adding complete proteins to our diets can help us avoid amino acid deficiencies. While there aren't a lot of vegan foods that are naturally complete proteins, we can make our own complete proteins by combining protein from different sources. This recipe does exactly that.

Brunch is the best meal. Lazy weekends, sleeping in, and eating the best breakfast foods later than we should, with people we love. What could be better than that?

Of course, no brunch would be complete without a stack of light, fluffy pancakes drenched in maple syrup. In this version, we're combining plant milk and vinegar to create vegan buttermilk. The vinegar curdles the milk and helps it develop a buttermilk flavor.

In the PVT (pre-vegan times), I cooked pancakes a lot. Like a couple times a week. I would eat them with lots of fruit to make them "healthy". Once I became vegan, I tried some pancake recipes that were okay, but none of them were so good that I thought, "I have to make this again!"

As a vegan, I have been chocolate brownie-deprived for a very long time. I've tried many vegan brownie recipes, and none quite stacked up to the brownies I made from a box as a child, with the chewy edges and fudgy middle. Until now.

These are hands-down the best vegan brownies I've ever had. With a rich chocolate flavor, these fudgy brownies are not only the best vegan brownies I've had, they may be the best brownies period.