It’s an amateur vegan cooking competition held here in NYC. Back in August, I competed in the inaugural VeggieConquest: Battle Apple.

As you can tell by the name, the secret ingredient is cranberry and I need to prepare a dessert. This is definitely a challenge for me since I’ve never used cranberries before…ever. Well except maybe dried ones in a salad, but that doesn’t count.

Besides making a dessert with cranberry, I really wanted my dish to be as environmentally friendly as possible. I wanted to buy as little ingredients as possible. The ones that I would buy, I preferred to be from local sources. So I got myself a challenge within a challenge.

I started to check out recipes online and came across a million and five cranberry pies and cakes. Those are all fine and good, but making a raw pie or cake would be a challenge. I wouldn’t have the proper means to keep it chilled. The pie or cake would become instant mush. No bueno.

In checking out the baked recipes, I saw that most of them featured the same flavor combination. That helped to trigger some ideas for me.

I headed out to the health food store and picked up some items. Oranges didn’t make the cut, since they don’t grow very well in NYC in November.

After a day or so of tinkering with my dish and running it by a few people, I have it down with something that I’m comfortable with. For now, I need to give my taste buds a rest for a few days because they are completely shot from too many cranberries.