I cannot tell you how much I love running this blog for a living. I get to do something creative that I genuinely enjoy that makes a real difference in people’s lives and encourages people to move towards a more compassionate way to feed themselves. That’s priceless, but there are a few aspects of developing recipes for a living that I could frankly live without. The biggest by far is people stealing the fruit of your hard work and passing it off as theirs.
Recently, another UK-based blogger, whom I’ve already emailed about taking my recipes and publishing them on her website without giving due credit, shamelessly plagiarised this recipe. She takes my original recipe, makes a few minor tweaks to the ingredients or doubles the amount to obfuscate the similarity and claims, sometimes by omission and sometimes explicitly, that the recipe is hers. She did the same to my spanakopita recipe (including copying my images, which she now changed as they gave the whole thing away), my biscotti recipe and vegan raspberry bakewell tart recipe and I’m sure that’s just the tip of the iceberg and that there are other bloggers she ‘borrows’ from too. I didn’t progress the matter further last time as I stupidly hoped that she will stop and I did not quite realise how cynical the entire operation was but I have come to realise that she won’t stop unless she is made to stop. She is saving herself a lot of time, frustration and wasted ingredients by using recipes that have already been thoroughly tested by me and the people who have successfully made them and by doing that she is able to grow her blog at a much quicker rate. There is clearly no moral compass there at all. It blows my mind, quite frankly, as that’s not how I have been brought up. Unfortunately, I am not able to let this one go and I do need to change gears. Duncan and I have come up with a plan and while it will take a while to bring her operation down, I am happy to wait a little to get the results. She is certainly making my case stronger with each plagiarised recipe… So yes, this is the ugly side of blogging that not many people know about, but I think that anyone who creates things for a living knows exactly why I am so upset about this. And what I came to realise is that the bigger and more trusted your blog is, the more often this happens, sadly. From other news, as Thanksgiving is approaching and this year it seems like gathering in big numbers is not the thing to do, I decided to ‘minimise’ this very vegan pecan pie, which happens to be one of my favourite sweet recipes on here. I love small, bite size desserts. They are cute, portable and not as tempting to overeat on. These little guys can be made in small custard tart moulds like these, but equally you can also make them in a 12 hole muffin tin if that’s what you have. The crispy pastry hides away sweet, nutty and custardy filling that’s to die for. If you are not a confident pastry maker, you could pour the filling into these little oat shells instead. I hope you’ll enjoy these as much as we have enjoyed testing them for you 😉 .
80 ml / 1/3 cup maple syrup 75 g / 1/3 heaped cup demerara sugar, dark brown muscovado sugar or coconut sugar (for refined sugar free version) 35 g / 3 tsbp coconut oil (I use refined coconut oil) 150 g / 5.3 oz silken tofu (I use Clearspring) 1 tsp vanilla paste or vanilla extract zest of ½ orange ½ tsp ground cinnamon ¼ tsp fine sea salt 1 tbsp tapioca starch or cornflour / cornstarch 100 g / 3½ oz / ½ cup chopped pecans + 12 pecan halves, to decorate
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