What's that you say?  You bake vegan monkey bread, vegan chocolate chip cookies, and vegan rum balls and then eat them along side meat?  Real meat?  As in you are "we just bought a sixth of a cow to eat" meat-eaters?  Who are you people???

Well, as it turns out, we aren't as crazy as we sound.  Because Amanda can't eat milk or eggs (without paying dire consequences and who wants to go there) we tend to follow vegan recipes and then add some meat to our meals in other ways.  At first I thought that cooking for someone with allergies was going to be a huge challenge and limiting in the variety and complexity of the food we eat.  Turns out the only thing we haven't been able to find a dairy and egg free version of is meringue.  Well, and cheese but that is a sore subject for Amanda anyway.  And me?  I have become so accustomed to cooking without milk or eggs that it is second nature!

As we mentioned in our Christmas post we made vegan monkey bread for our Yellow House Christmas which turned out just as well as the original and was tres délicieux.  If you haven't heard of monkey bread it is basically balls of biscuit dough dipped in melted butter, rolled in cinnamon sugar and then baked so that when you turn out the pan there is a pile of gooey, sticky, sinful little bites of deliciousness to pull apart and devour.

A classic monkey bread recipe via http://www.craftyinthekitchen.com/

So how do you take a non-vegan recipe and make it safe for Miss Amanda to eat?  We typically break a recipe down into its components and look at them separately to see what makes the most sense.  In the case of monkey bread, since the base is biscuits (most commonly refrigerated biscuit dough) we looked at our options for biscuits first.

The Joy of Vegan Baking by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau has become our Bible when it comes to the basics of vegan baking.  Using her Drop Biscuits recipe and making a few tweaks in their preparation, we were able to make a pretty darn tasty version of what would be a completely off limits food for Amanda.  And you never would have guessed that there was no milk involved.

Yellow House Monkey Bread

Ingredients
1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2/3 cup coconut milk
1/3 cup canola oil

1/4 cup Earth Balance dairy free margarine, melted
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon

Directions
Preheat the oven to 475 degrees F.

Mix together sugar and cinnamon in a shallow dish.  Set aside.

In a large bowl, mix together the flour, baking powder, and salt until combined.  Add the milk and oil and stir just until the dry ingredients are moistened. It will be very sticky and thick, not smooth like cake batter.

Turn dough out onto a floured surface and roll out to 1/2 inch thickness.  Cut into roughly 2 inch squares.  Roll each square into a ball.  Dip balls into melted Earth Balance, then roll in cinnamon sugar.  Place balls in baking dish.

Bake about 10-12 minutes, depending on the shape of your dish.  The Earth Balance should melt and the dish should look gooey and shiny.  The dough is cooked when it is is firm to the touch.

Let cool for  5 minutes, then turn out onto a serving dish.

Adapted from The Joy of Vegan Baking.  Patrick-Goudreau, Colleen. "Drop Biscuits." Recipe. The Joy of Vegan Baking: The Compassionate Cooks' Traditional Treats and Sinful Sweets. Beverly, MA: Fair Winds Press, 2007.pg. 48.