chili potluck

Last night was spent busy making blondies for the chili potluck at work today. Our department can sure put together a potluck! I was super excited too because I was debuting a new type of blondie. Veggiegirl has an awesome base recipe for vegan blondies that I have been tweaking and playing around with. First off I will start with yesterday's lunch:
The last of the chickpea salad (I'm excited to try and replicate this!)

Grape juice box

Peach Medley (these are really delicious...and all natural)

Amy's Brown Rice and Black Eyed Pea bowl (so delicious!)

These are the Orange-Almond Vegan blondies...

These are the PB-Chocolate Chip Blondies...

Look at this sky! I snapped these on the way home. Don't worry, the car was stopped.

Again, beautiful!

And finally, my lunch today was a lot of repeating, except for this fruit salad I made last night while the blondies were baking. It includes plums, kiwi, and peaches. So delicious!


Ok now onto the blondie recipes. I have made the PB Chocolate one's before and am just lazy to link back to it right now. However, here is the recipe I used for Orange Almond blondies with notes following.

Orange-Almond Blondies
*adapted from VeggieGirl's Blondie recipe

3/4 c. Soy yogurt (I used Silk Vanilla)
1/4 c. olive oil
1 c. sugar
2 tsp vanilla
2 tsp molasses
1 1/4 c. flour
3/4 tsp baking soda
1 c. toasted almond slivers
1 tbsp natural orange extract
1/8 c. non-dairy milk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and prepare an 8 inch square pan with oil. Mix wet ingredients together, through molasses. Add dry ingredients one at a time, mixing well after each, through baking soda. Add orange extract and almonds. If mixture is too thick, slowly add milk a tablespoon at a time until you can stir mixture. Pour into pan and bake for 40 minutes, until a toothpick/knife inserted in center comes out clean.

*Notes* I would really like to take out the extract and use fresh squeezed orange juice but that will take more tweaking. For now, the extract will do. You can use less, but definitely no more than a tablespoon. I threw in less than a 1/4 c. semi-sweet chocolate chips as well. Probably dark chocolate chips would be best with the orange. I'd be careful of overloading the blondies with stuff though. Since I had the extract in the batter, I didn't need any almond milk to thin it out. The flavor was really nice with these and they smelled amazing!