Easy vegan vanilla slice

By Tracy


This one is simple: a no-bake (stove-top & fridge), veganised vanilla slice.

Ingredients:

Packet of plain square vegan crackers
(e.g. Jacob's cream crackers)

Vegan custard made up as follows:
4 tbsp custard powder (Bird's and Orgran are vegan and have no artificial colourings)
2 tbsp sugar
1 pint (about 568 ml) plant milk (I used soy).
(Basically it's an ordinary vegan custard but made with double measure of powder, so that it's thicker)

A cup or so of icing sugar. You can either mix it with passionfruit pulp & juice to the right, spreadable consistency, or use a little plant milk plus a drop of lemon extract -- something slightly tangy or acidic to offset the thickness of the filling.


Method:

Place one layer of crackers in the base of a deep-sided rectangular tray. You may have to bevel the corners to make them fit; you can see I also used some thinner strips at the edges. On a pyrex dish, I didn't need to grease the base.

Make up your vegan custard to the thick consistency you see in the picture:

Spoon the custard as evenly as you can over the base. You have to act quickly or it will get too firm:

Place the next layer of crackers over the top of the custard and press down to get it as even as you can. It doesn't matter if your "paving" is slightly bumpy because these are the lines you will cut along to serve, anyway:

Quickly mix up your icing and spread it over the top layer of crackers. It doesn't matter if the icing is quite wet, as the crackers will soften by absorbing some of the moisture from below and above.




Place in fridge to set and chill. The longer you can leave it, the better the crackers will soften. Using the crackers is a lower-fat approach than using pastry (and no baking involved), and you virtually can't taste the difference.

Sweet Treats 2: Vegan Caramel Tart

By Tracy

This one I adapted from various internet recipes for "Banoffee Pie" -- no bananas here, but I ended up adding more strawberries than in the photo, because this is extremely sweet and needs something acidic to cut the flavour and texture.

Crumb base:

250g digestive biscuits (McVities are vegan)

100g Nuttelex (or other vegan margarine)

Caramel filling:

100g Nuttelex (or other vegan margarine)

100g dark brown sugar

1 can soy condensed milk (see here if you can't get this in shops; you can also make it yourself according to various webpages)

Topping:

thick vegan cream (you can either buy it or make it: see Rose Elliot's Vegan Feasts)*

grated chocolate (dark or soy-milk chocolate)

fruit pieces

Crush the biscuits in a large bowl; melt 100g Nuttelex and stir through till well mixed. Press into the base and sides of a spring-form tin. (My mixture was a little too dry so the edges crumbled here and there; on the other hand, too much Nuttelex will make a crumb-crust greasy and too heavy.) Chill while you do the rest.

Melt Nuttelex and dark brown sugar together in a pre-greased saucepan till sugar dissolves. (I don't use Teflon, so I just greased the saucepan with Nuttelex and it worked.)

When it's melted, add the vegan condensed milk and stir while bringing to boil. Don't put it on a high heat -- you have to be patient with this bit. Now take your crumb-base out of the fridge. When the caramel mixture starts to boil, take it off the stove and pour into the base.

Chill it for at least an hour or it will be too runny.

[Left: basic tart, with slightly crumbled edges, but set firm]

When it's set, top it with the vegan cream, grated chocolate and strawberries or whatever you choose.

[Left: starting to pipe the vegan cream on]

[*The vegan cream is made by first cooking a small amount of cornflour with soy milk & a little vanilla, cooling that completely -- not in fridge -- and whipping margarine, then folding the two together, piecemeal. My Wakeman & Baskerville Vegan Cookbook -- a much-used standard -- has a similar method. If you prefer to buy vegan cream that is thick enough to use in this way, try the Cruelty Free Shop online or check in shops. There's even a spray-can vegan cream...]

Sweet Treats 1

By Tracy

Very sweet treats... and vegan, of course.

First, a cheap and easy one that Australians often call "honeycomb" (though it contains no honey), and that elsewhere is called "hokey pokey" or "cinder toffee".

I adapted the recipe from here (thanks, K at "In the Mood for Noodles") but doubled the quantities because my tray was 20cm square and I didn't want too thin a layer. (I needn't have worried!).

Note that you need a very big saucepan to make this, because once you put in the bicarb, it grows monstrously.

Next time I will use one teaspoon less of bicarb, hoping to reduce the slight aftertaste.

I also lightly scored the surface while it was still moist, so as to make breaking easier.

The other vegans mention needing dry weather to make this work; it's been raining heavily here (happily!) but since we have a fire going in the stove I thought I'd try it anyway. It's still chewy (not entirely hardened yet) but I am advised it tastes good.

Tim's Tapioca

By Tracy

Tim's had a sore throat, and so requested this smooth and soft pudding which he loves at any time...



Ingredients:

1 cup seed tapioca
4 cups soy milk
1 cup sugar or other sweetener
1 tsp vanilla essence

Soak the dry tapioca in the soy milk for an hour or more.

Add vanilla essence. Bring mixture gently to the boil. (If it's too fast, the mixture will catch and burn on the bottom of the saucepan.)

Simmer till the tapioca looks clear, or mostly clear. (If the tapioca is still opaque, it will be hard and gritty.)

Remove and stir the sugar through it, then pour into bowl.

You can eat this hot (runny) or let it chill (sets into a jelly-like texture).

There are lots of other things you can do with tapioca (and sago) but this is one very simple vegan option. Serve alone, or with soy icecream, vegan cream, fruit, coconut cream... etc.

Vegan chocolate cream tart

By Tracy

Today seems to be vegan cooking day. Every day (for us) is vegan cooking day -- but this one more than usual.

You need:

Vegan shortcrust pastry base* -- prebake at approx 180 deg C until golden, pricking with fork and flattening as needed if it puffs up or bubbles (takes about 10 min). Let it cool.

When the base is cool, make up the following to pour into it and chill:

5 dessertspoons cornflour (sifted!)
5-6 dessertspoons sugar
3-4 dessertspoons cocoa (sifted!)
2.5 cups soy milk

You proceed as if making custard -- that is, take two small-to-medium saucepans, and in one, mix the dry ingredients with a little of the soy milk. In the other, heat the soy milk with the vanilla essence till it nearly boils, then take it off the hotplate and pour it into the dry-mix saucepan, stirring the whole time. Put this now-full saucepan onto the hotplate and, still stirring to prevent lumps forming, bring it up to the boil. Remove from heat when it has thickened like any custard. Pour immediately into the pastry shell.

(If you don't stir evenly and continuously, it will burn or form lumps, or both! But it's actually very easy.)

Leave the whole tart to cool, first outside the fridge and then inside if it needs longer. If you put it in the fridge too soon, condensation can make it a little soggy and water droplets spoil the top (but it still tastes good).

When it's completely cool, make a mock cream as follows: whip four dessertspoons of Nuttelex (vegan margarine) with four dessertspoons of sifted icing sugar, and pipe around the inside rim of the pastry shell.

Let the cream piping set in the fridge, and then it's ready to eat.

It tastes luxurious but is very inexpensive, and easy to make from ingredients you could already have in the cupboard, etc. -- needs nothing fancy.

My pictured effort is a little rough because the pastry was slightly too small for the pie dish, and I made it very fast while preparing dinner! -- but even a ragged-edge tart tastes okay...

All recipes detailed in this blog are my own; when I use someone else's, for copyright reasons, I indicate the books where you can find them.

*Borg's and most varieties of Pampas frozen pastry sheets are vegan: see the Vegan Network of Victoria. They also list many other ready-made products that are suitable for vegans, and they carefully update their pages. You can also make shortcrust pastry from scratch, using Nuttelex and flour. Anchor Lion Pastry Mix (dry, in a box -- you add water) contains no animal fat and they confirm it is vegan too. So there are many easy options for vegan pastry.