Local Student Pens Vegan Dessert Cookbook
For her work on My Sweet Vegan, Hannah was recently interviewed and featured in the Stamford Advocate. Article by Moina Noor …
Think eggs, milk and butter are essential to scrumptious desserts? Hannah Kaminsky will try to convince you otherwise. Kaminsky, who is 19, recently published her first cookbook, “My Sweet Vegan,” which includes more than 70 recipes for goodies such as Root Beer Float Cupcake, Chai “Cheesecake” and Mocha Devastation Cake, for which she won a bake-off at the Dogwood Festival in Fairfield in 2006.
In the next few weeks, she’ll be signing copies of the book at Borders in Wilton and Stamford.
Kaminsky, a Fairfield resident and freshman at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, became a vegan when she was 14. Her love of animals and online research about veganism motivated the change.
“At first, the baking was just about making things that I could eat,” says Kaminsky. Vegans, she explains, seek to exclude the use of animals for food, clothing or any other purpose. A 2006 poll conducted by Harris Interactive found that 1.4 percent of Americans never eat meat, poultry, fish, seafood, dairy products or eggs and were therefore essentially vegan in their eating habits.
“Even I could have been convinced that eggs and dairy were indispensable to delectable sweets,” writes Kaminsky in the book’s introduction.
“During my freshman year in high school, I churned out muffins and cookies that were more akin to cement doorstops than desserts, but I never gave up,” says Kaminsky, who has been baking since she was a child and comes from a family of bakers.
In creating her vegan recipes, Kaminsky set a high standard. “It was unacceptable in my eyes to serve a good vegan pastry. It needed to be delicious by anyone’s standards,” she writes.
Kaminsky says there are plenty of nondairy alternatives on the market that make vegan baking simpler than it may seem at first. For milk and cream, she usually uses soy milk or soy creamer. For butter, she uses nondairy margarine. Through trial and error, she determined the best egg substitutes. Sometimes she found that eggs, or their substitutes, could be left out. In other recipes, fruit purees or nondairy yogurt take the place of eggs. Kaminsky also likes to substitute maple syrup and agave nectar for sugar to create different tastes.
Many of the recipes in “My Sweet Vegan” - Green Tea Tiramisu, Pomegranate Ginger Cupcakes, Pink Lemonade Tartlets among them - reflect Kaminsky’s adventurous tastes. However, she also does vegan versions of the classics: Silken Chocolate Mousse Bake, Banana Foster Cake, Pumpkin Pecan Pie, Black & White Cookies.
Kaminsky’s love of baking is part of her overall passion for crafting, including knitting, crocheting, beading and photography. Color photographs taken by Kaminsky accompany every recipe in the cookbook.
Kaminsky started writing about cooking by publishing a blog titled, “Bittersweet” (bittersweetblog.wordpress.com). She says she started blogging as a creative outlet to share her crafting, baking and photography. She posts almost daily and has attracted fans in the online vegan and baking communities.
It was through the Bittersweet blog that Kaminsky’s publisher found her.
“The Root Beer Float Cupcake recipe is how I discovered Hannah,” says Alisa Fleming, publisher of Fleming Ink, a small publishing company based in Nevada that focuses on niche market books. When I viewed these photos and the accompanying story and recipe, I was very intrigued and pursued looking into her blog and contacting her. That recipe is appropriately on the cover of ‘My Sweet Vegan.’ ”
“We are getting such a positive response with this book. It’s such a unique book. We are trying to appeal to a larger audience than just the vegan community. It has broad appeal to everyone who loves desserts,” says Fleming.
Because Kaminsky’s recipes are dairy-free, individuals with milk allergies can eat her creations.
Kaminsky says the success of her recipes lies in trial and error.
“I sometimes have to test my recipe five times before I get it just right. I’ll never forget the time that my vegan marshmallows literally exploded in the oven,” she says with a laugh.
These days, Kaminsky comes home from college on weekends to test her recipes. She is working on a second cookbook, which she says also will be “sweet oriented,” and would like to make a career in food after she graduates.
“I’d like to continue to write books, do my photography and maybe even become a pastry chef. I have a whole notebook of recipe ideas. I like to think of interesting textures and pairing interesting flavors together. I get inspired by the seasons, something I see on TV. Everything gives me inspiration.”
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Hannah Kaminsky will sign copies of her book at Borders, 14 Danbury Road, Wilton, Saturday at 2 p.m. and at Borders, 1041 High Ridge Road, Stamford, Saturday, April 26, also at 2 p.m.