Late last year I posted about a new range of vegan chocolate bars available in Australia from Sjaak's Organic Chocolates. Now their Valentine's Day range is here too! The range is vegan, fair trade, organic and gluten free.

Dark Chocolate Heart - filled with chocolates




You can purchase these products from:


The Cruelty Free Shop
The Green Edge
Vegan Online
The Vegan Store
Bliss Organic Cafe

I have one box of the gorgeous Birdie Tuffles Gift Box to giveaway! The giveaway is open to Aussie residents only and all you have to do is leave me a comment below (leave me a contact email if yours doesn't show up on your profile). The winner will be announced Tuesday, February 7, 2012.

We dropped by the store on the day it opened to check out the products. They have the well-known gluten free/vegan brands like Orgran, Schar and Eskal plus a few brands I hadn't seen before.

Here's a look at what we got

Ice cream cones, bread rolls, almond milk, frozen butterscotch cookie dough, Bourbon biscuits (not soy free), pancake mix, Soyatoo rice cream, chocolate cake mix, chocolate crackers, sour worms and gummi bears.

The Choc Pockets are a new Orgran product, they're not strongly flavoured and they taste like their crackers with a little bit of added chocolate. The Bourbon biccies were for my Mum because I know she loves them and the cookie dough is in the freezer section, it's from a company called The Bikkie Dough Co (cute name!) and only two of the flavours were vegan so we grabbed one to try but I haven't baked them yet.

I'm really happy to have another store nearby where I can buy gleegan products easily and I hope they do well because even though the number of gluten intolerant and coeliacs are growing, it's still a bit of a niche market.

Jo's Gluten Free Pantry
Shop 8/2 Durham Ave
St Ives NSW 2075

Dream Big - caramel and peanut butter topped with whole peanuts and covered in vegan milk chocolate


Treasure - crunchy peanut butter topped with caramel and covered in vegan rice milk chocolate


Chocolate Covered Hazelnuts - mini tub of organic, fair trade, gluten free chocolate covered hazelnuts

The Christmas boxes and the hazelnuts are available in limited quantities from The Green Edge and Bliss Organic Cafe.

This was delicious and such a nice dessert. It was really sweet but the lime helped to cut through that and I added some strawberries because they always go well with crêpes.

I'm so impressed with how well the crêpes worked out, none of them stuck to the pan or fell apart and I got about 6 medium-large sized crêpes from the batter. So if you're looking to try gluten free crêpes, use buckwheat flour and you'll have good results.

Amaranth Polenta with Roasted Chillis
I recently bought some amaranth and knew I had to try this recipe.  It's already gluten and soy free so I didn't make any changes.

I served it was some garlicky mushrooms and home-grown kale as well as some steamed broccoli. The polenta was soft in the middle with a crispy outside and it was really delicious and a bit spicy. Sometimes I find polenta a bit bland but this definitely wasn't.

I don't know what texture seitan is supposed to have, you can let me know in the comments if you like, but I think these make a decent substitute for most recipes that call for chorizo/sausages made from seitan. You can also bake them but I think they dry out a little more.

Bake to the sopes, I'm definitely not going to win any sopes-shaping contests as I had trouble with mine. I think I might have made the mix too wet as I found they kept sticking to my hands so I gave up trying to make them perfect, I fried them and then set them on a baking tray while I made the rest. After sitting on the tray for a while, the mix dried and I was able to shape them a bit better, so if you have trouble, just wait for them to dry out and then pinch the sides up more.


I was hesitant to use spinach in the filling because I think cooked spinach is gross and slimy but I did it anyway and I'm happy I did. I used  baby spinach and I added some red cabbage, avocado and cashew crema for the toppings.

These were delicious and I really, really liked the spinach - it's a miracle! The filling was garlicky, limey and so they made for a very satisfying dinner.




I thought I might not like the filling as corn is quite sweet but this was really yummy, soft and I liked the addition of lemon juice and cayenne.

Bolivian Salteñas (Sweet and Spicy Mushroom-Potato Empanadas)
These empanadas are meant to be made with wheat dough and shaped standing up with a crimped edge but I used the same corn dough as I used for the corn-filled empanadas so I shaped them the same way and I fried them too. For the filling I used mushrooms instead of seitan and I left out the olives.


These were also great, they are sweet and spicy but again I didn't mind the sweetness as it really worked.

This flour combination worked really well and the cake held together while sliced. It's a really sweet cake but a small slice isn't too overwhelming and it tastes delicious. I also agree with Susan, it's really filling.


Cherry Almond Muffins
I wanted to make these because I love the Cherry Almond Cookies from Vegan Cookies Invade Your Cookie Jar so much.

I used the same flour combination as I used for the cake and I used dried cherries instead of fresh. I also left out the yoghurt and added 220ml of rice milk instead.


I liked these muffins but I don't think the flours worked as well in the muffins as they did in the cake. The  muffins were a little dense and the almond flavour isn't as strong as it is in the cookies. I think next time I'd leave out the coconut flour and use a starch like arrowroot or tapioca.

As you can see the top got a little burnt, but the inside was perfect. Before putting the mixture in the oven, the instructions say to sprinkle the remaining cocoa and sugar over the mixture and then pour in the boiling water so I think the cocoa on top burnt and that's why it's so black.

The Orgran bread mix was a bit difficult to work with, I felt like I was mixing up marshmallow mix, it was so stretchy and fluffy and hard to flatten onto the baking tray. I topped it with thinly sliced potatoes & olive oil but had to leave off the suggested oregano for Chris.

This was good and it made a lot but it was a little plain. I'd definitely add some herbs next time and I might consider using another type of gluten free bread flour or I'd add some flavour to the dough because it was really plain. But it was a quick and easy way to make gluten free pizza which was great.

I keep meaning to try a few more recipes from this book so hopefully I'll have time once VeganMoFo is over.

Do you have a favourite non-vegan cookbook that you still like to use?