I wasn’t quite sure how to review The Joy of Vegan Baking by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau. The biggest hurdle is that I don’t tend to make a lot of baked goods or desserts, because I’m following the McDougall Program (whereby baked goods aren’t really a staple), and living alone, so whatever the pace of eating is, eventually I’ll be eating the whole thing (which is bad news).

But recently I had an out-of-town relative in for Easter and there was a dinner planned, so I decided to use that opportunity to try some of the recipes. The Friday before Easter, we had dinner at Millennium in San Francisco, which is the pinnacle of high-end gourmet vegan dining. My plan all along was to bake the Meditteranean Olive Bread from the cookbook and take it to the dinner, but the plan kept building from there.

At that dinner, my cousin randomly mentioned vegan cookies, and how on several occassions he bought some at the store and they were dry and awful. I told him that’s usually how it goes, because vegan cookies don’t use all of the hydrogenated oils and such that give other cookies their shelf life (and often times stay on the shelf too long). So, I just happened to inquire what his favorite cookie is. He said Oatmeal Raisin. Mission one.

The second thing I heard incorrectly, but I was under the impression that his wife was a fan of the chocolate soy pudding they sold in the stores, but they were underwhelmed by that, too. I also knew that Goudreau’s book had chocolate pudding in there, so this dinner kept expanding as far as what I planned to bring.

I made all three at the same time, more or less, starting with the cookies, then on to the loaf, and finishing with the pudding.

I was a bit concerned that I didn’t have an electric mixer for the cookies, although the recipe didn’t explicitly require one, but I recalled from Christmas how well that folded the vegan butter and sugar together. It still worked fine without one, and the cookies came out great. Initially, I made them slightly rounder, but after the first batch started flattening them out a bit more.

The olive loaf was also my debut run using a silicone loaf pan, which turned out nicely, except it lacked that darker tinge that comes from using metal. It was so strange seeing bread that looked the same from all angles that I cut a piece off the end to make sure it was done, and it tasted fabulous.

So far, so good. The pudding is where things went a bit wrong. I’d never cooked with kudzu root before, so I can’t quite pinpoint where I went off-course. The recipe called for ground kudzu, and my local hippie co-op had kudzu chunks. But, since the recipe called for you to dissolve the kudzu in water, I didn’t really bother grinding it up. This could be the point of failure.

All I know is that the pudding never really set, but seemed to have congealed chunks floating around in it, making me think that the kudzu (having not been ground) didn’t fully dissolve as much as it disappeared into the liquid and when folded into the chocolate, was unable to affect the chemistry of the chocolate.

Again, all guesswork. That said, the quality of the chocolate was so good, that it vague state somewhere between solid and liquid didn’t prevent its consumption.

Overall, the entries were pretty stellar. The cookies redeemed my cousin’s notion of vegan cookies being dry and bland, a sadly well-earned but incorrect reputation. The Olive Bread was the hit of the dinner, and well on its way to be a staple when I want something easy to bring to dinner parties. The pudding was the weak entry of the bunch, but I’m going to blame my lack of ground kudzu for now. Certainly, the recipe made some great-tasting liquid chocolate, despite its lack of congealing.

The strange part of the vegan baking experiment was that I was not cooking for a vegan meal, or a vegetarian meal, but in fact, an annual tradition of grilled lamb. The bread featured fresh rosemary and was heralded with the phrase, I’m sad to say: “This will go perfect with the lamb!”

So, yeah, that was a bit strange.

On the whole, I have a great vibe for the rest of this book. Having listened to every episode of Goudreau’s podcast, I know her passion and knowledge first-hand. It was good to put her recipes to the test, and I would totally fly blind and bring any of her dishes, untasted, to any event without worry.

The book, which won last year’s “Cookbook of the Year” from VegNews magazine, is divided into sections for every sort of baking you can imagine, as well as a few that sort of stray from the ‘baking’ moniker (sorbets, smoothies, beverages, etc.)

The book has an exhaustive introduction about vegan baking not being an oxymoron, although I’m not sure why this notion exists (maybe it’s all those hard, dry baked goods in stores?). If there’s anything on which I can fault the book, it is Goudreau’s notion of experimentation, such as challenging people to try different non-dairy milks to see how it will change the taste of the dish. I think she could have recommended which she found to work best for each dish, but suggest we try others, as well.

Of course, that’s a minor ding in what is bound to be a vegan staple. Of course, just writing that is limiting. As Goudreau writes toward the front of the book, many people can’t believe that delicious baked goods are possible without butter, eggs and dairy, when it is more accurate to say baked goods rely on fat, moisture, and leavening, all of which are available without animal products.

So, whether your guided by compassion, lowering your cholesterol, or don’t care about any of that stuff and just want some kick-ass recipes, this is a great book to add to your collection.

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(At some point in the future, I will be doing podcast reviews and other stuff that will feature Goudreau on the site, but by all means check out her podcast. Unlike a lot of vegan podcasts that are too scattered, too preachy, or just boring, Goudreau really puts a lot of effort into hers, and it is always worth your time to listen.)