Raw vegan cheesecake, three ways

I'm quite excited about this post.

Part of this excitement is about sharing my experiments with raw vegan cheesecakes. It has been a lot of fun.

Part of it, too, is that today is the one year anniversary of Bite-Sized Thoughts starting.

A lot has happened in the year, and I have certainly learnt a huge amount. At the same time, it has gone quickly - I now can't imagine not blogging, but it doesn't feel as if I've been doing it for 12 months. I have truly come to love the blogging world and the process of organising my life and recipes (or some components thereof...) into blog form.

The three recipes I've chosen to post today capture so much of what I enjoy about cooking and food. They also capture a lot of what I enjoy about veganism. Of course, part of my enjoyment of vegan food stems from the are health and environmental benefits (as I see them anyway) and the ethical issues around animal produce. But it is also magical. That you can take natural, 100% plant-based foods and turn them into cheesecake - it is staggering. It captivates me and entertains me, and makes me very happy indeed.

I hope that these recipes might make you happy too.

All of them make 4 servings, so the quantities are small ones. I made mine in two individual, medium sized ramekins, and the pictures are of one of the resulting small cheesecakes. Doubling the ingredients would give a single larger cheesecake to serve 8 or so people.

All recipes can be found in streamlined version here.

For the non-streamlined version, let's start with chocolate.

Now the thing is, I don't actually like (regular) cheesecake. This is hardly surprising when you consider that I don't like creamy, cheesey, or milky dishes - cheesecake is like my horror dessert. The base I usually like; the filling is usually not my friend.

This does raise the question of why I have made three versions of vegan cheesecake.

Why? Well, I thought they might be different. Perhaps cheesecake without cream, without cheese and without milk would be cheesecake that I do like?

Despite this reasoning, it did seem safest to start with chocolate - that, I rarely dislike.

The inspiration for this first recipe, a chocolate raspberry cheesecake, came from various chocolate avocado desserts. I'm not sure what made me think I could convert 'dessert' into 'cheesecake', but this product did seem pretty cheesecakey to me (although, granted, I am a non-cheesecake eater...).

It was certainly creamy. Dense. Rich. Slightly but not very sweet. Most definitely chocolatey. In typically cheesecake form, the filling was also nearly too creamy and dense and rich. But - and here is the key! - it was nearly but not quite. Vegan won the day and small slices worked very well indeed, filling and all.

Chocolate berry cheesecake

Serves 4

Inspired by the chilled double chocolate torte on Oh She Glows; 
raw brownies with chocolate icing or pure amazingness on Wayfaring Chocolate; and 
raw carob cheesecake on Blissfully Vegan.

Print recipe

Ingredients

Base

1/2 cup raw almonds

1/4 cup dates, pitted and roughly chopped

Water as needed (I used about 1 tsp)

Filling

1 medium avocado (mine was ~120g flesh)

1/2 cup frozen raspberries

1 tbsp agave or maple syrup (use 1 1/2 tbsp if you want a sweeter taste; this version was just sweet)

2 1/2 tbsp good-quality cocoa

Topping

1/2 - 1 cup frozen raspberries, thawed

Method

Line two individual ramekins or a small pie dish with cling wrap.

Process the base ingredients until finely processed and starting to clump together. Add water if needed to get a thick and sticky consistency. Press the mixture into the bottom of your ramekins / pie dish.

Process or beat all filling ingredients until smooth and well combined. Divide between the two ramekins and cover with cling wrap. 

Set in the freezer for 2 hours and then serve with the extra thawed raspberries.

or

If making in advance, this will keep in the freezer for at least 3 days (longer if stored in an airtight container). Before serving, allow the cheesecake to thaw slightly at room temperature (15 - 30 minutes), and then top with the extra thawed raspberries. 

I don't think you can go wrong with chocolate and berries. This was certainly not wrong and I liked it very, very much indeed. I suspect it will be featuring again.

For my second cheesecake, I wanted to make a version of the lavender and lemon cheesecake featured on This Rawsome Vegan Life. Lavender as a baking ingredient has intrigued me for some time, and this seemed like as good a time as any to jump into trying it.

Except, I couldn't find any dried lavender. Frustratingly, I had seen it at a supermarket a few months back, but on re-visiting it they no longer stocked it. Neither did anywhere else I looked. In the end, I gave up.

I bought this instead, in an effort to console myself for the lavender-less trips:

Perhaps vanilla bean paste would be just the thing to make the perfect vegan cheesecake?

I changed my inspiration sources and settled on honey, vanilla and pistachio instead of lavender and lemon.

It seemed like a promising flavour combination, but the result wasn't quite as I had hoped...

'Honey', vanilla and pistachio cheesecake 
(use agave to make this vegan)

Serves 4

Inspired by this honey-pistachio cheesecake topping on Taste.com.au, and
the honey ingredient in the lavender lemon cheesecake on This Rawsome Vegan Life

Print recipe

Ingredients

Base
1/4 cup pistachios

1/4 cup almonds

1/3 cup sesame seeds

1/4 cup dates

Filling

1 cup cashews, soaked in water for at least 4 hours

1/3 cup raw honey or agave (I used half of each, for no real reason other than wanting to conserve the more expensive agave but not wanting to finish off our honey) - I would use less than this in future

1 tsp coconut oil

1 tsp vanilla bean paste

2 tsp lemon juice

Topping

Extra pistachios, optional

Method

Line two individual ramekins or a small pie dish with cling wrap.

Process the base ingredients until finely processed and starting to clump together. Press the mixture into the bottom of your ramekins / pie dish.

Process or beat all filling ingredients until smooth and well combined. Divide between the two ramekins and cover with cling wrap. 

Set in the fridge or freezer for 2 - 4 hours and then serve with the extra pistachios

or

If making in advance, this will keep in the fridge or freezer for at least 3 days (longer if stored in an airtight container).

As alluded to above, I didn't like this at all. Perhaps it was my persisting fixation with lavender or perhaps it was that this was too close to a typical cheesecake - when it was set in the fridge, I didn't like the texture of the filling at all, being creamy and squishy and just not to my tastes.

Setting this in the freezer improved the consistency, and I found that it didn't turn solid even when frozen overnight. I still didn't enjoy the flavour though. It was too sweet, for a start - I would use much less honey / agave in future - and it was also vaguely nutty. I like nuts, but I didn't like the cashew undertones here.

Definitely a failure, at least for m7 tastes.

It did, though, provide the motivation for moving on to version three...

I still really wanted lavender and in the end I picked some from a neighbour's garden (!). I'm sure this isn't the approach one should take, but the lavender was already semi-dried by the summer sun; some time in a sunny spot in the kitchen dried it out further.

For this cheesecake, my challenge was in deciding what 'cream' base to use. Cashews seem to be a standard approach, but I was no longer keen on those after my negative experience with the version above. I had liked the result with avocado in the chocolate raspberry cheesecake, but I didn't really want a green lavender and lemon cheesecake.

In the end, though, that's exactly what I went for.

I could have made this lavender and lime, which would have made the colour appropriate, but I was keen on  lemon. I decided that retaining pistachios in the ingredient list would be my nod towards making the colour semi-appropriate, and so ended up with lavender, lemon and pistachio.

Lavender, lemon, and pistachio cheesecake

Serves 4
Adapted from lavender lemon cheesecake on This Rawsome Vegan Life

Print recipe

Ingredients

Base
1/4 cup pistachios

1/4 cup almonds
1/4 cup dates

Filling
1 small - medium avocado (mine was ~100g flesh)

1 tsp chia seeds

1/8 cup lemon juice

2 tbsp agave

1 tsp vanilla extract

Petals of 1 dried lavender stalk (~1 tsp), crushed

2 tsp dessicated coconut

Pinch salt

Topping
Extra pistachios, optional

Method

Line two individual ramekins or a small pie dish with cling wrap.

Process the base ingredients until finely processed and starting to clump together. Press the mixture into the bottom of your ramekins / pie dish.

Process or beat all filling ingredients until smooth and well combined. Divide between the two ramekins and cover with cling wrap. 

Set in the freezer for 2 hours and then serve with the extra pistachios

or

If making in advance, this will keep in the freezer for at least 3 days (longer if stored in an airtight container). Before serving, allow the cheesecake to thaw slightly at room temperature (15 - 30 minutes).

I loved this.

Really, truly loved it.

It was definitely magical. The green colour almost made it more so. It looked like an pea-inspired dessert, or something equally odd, but tasted like a dream.

With flavours of lemon and just slight lavender, this had just the right sweetness and creaminess.

I made Mr Bite try this one. He was very perplexed by the colour and ate his trial mouthful with his eyes closed. However, even he gave it positive feedback - and green, raw, vegan cheesecake with lavender in it is certainly not something I would expect him to review positively!

He thought it tasted like lemon cheesecake, and that the texture was cheesecake-like - somewhat of a relief given that he does enjoy normal cheesecake and is a better judge of 'cheesecake-ness' than I am.

Interestingly, he couldn't detect the lavender flavour but stated he didn't like 'the aftertaste'. I found the lavender to hit after the initial lemon notes, so suspect this aftertaste was the lavender. If you're not sure about lavender, perhaps half a stalk would be a good starting amount...for myself, I really enjoyed the subtle flavour hit and will be experimenting with this again.

This is a very long post, and if you are still reading - thank you, and I hope some of the above was entertaining to you as well as to me. I had great fun with these creations and I hope to have many more experimenting sessions as this blog goes into year two...

What do you find magical in the kitchen? Have there been dishes you've really enjoyed playing with?

I am linking the chocolate raspberry cheesecake into Ricki's 2013 Valentine's Day Wellness Weekend (14th-18th February 2013)...because really, what more could you want on Valentine's Day?

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