Evenin’ all! Hope you’re sitting comfortably because I have a mildly interesting yarn to spin ye afore we get on with this year’s Valentine’s recipe!
Many, many moons ago (it was 2010 actually) I had stayed up all night to watch the General Election. Depressed by the results and in dire need of some sugar, I decided I wanted some cheesecake, but there was none to be found. So out of the pitiful contents of a ten-student flat kitchen I created my own. It was pretty good and it hit the spot, even though I was so sleep deprived (I worked night shifts at the time so I’d been awake for about 48 hours) that I thought Eamonn Holmes could see through the TV into my bedroom.
Over the months I refined and tweaked the recipe until it was so good, word got about and a student website asked me to write it up for their recipe blog. I duly obliged and subsequently got pretty annoyed when they edited it massively to the point of contradicting some of the things I had said in the recipe!
Not satisfied that this bizarrely edited blog was the only version of my cheesecake recipe out there, I sold it to a publishing company I had worked with a couple of times before, who were thinking of putting out a cook-book. Thanks to non-disclosure agreements, and the fact my hard drive corrupted with the original recipe still on it, the only way I could share my creation was in an edible format. Still good, but I wanted others to be able to re-create my chocolatey bounty.
Fast forward a few years and the publishing company had gone under, relieving me of my contract. Not only that, but the recipe I sent to the student blog, the one that had been on my corrupted hard-drive, mysteriously re-appeared in my Dropbox one afternoon.
Now that I had the chance to share my cheesecake with y’all I started to wonder whether or not I could improve on the recipe in time for Valentine’s Day. Then I hit upon the idea which, oxymoronic though it may sound, ended up tasting pretty great. Vegan Cheesecake.
Ingredients: Serves 8-12
For the base
12 vegan digestive biscuits (I used Sainsbury’s Sweetmeal Digestives)
4 tbsps coconut oil
50g caster sugar
1 tbsp cocoa powder
For the topping
340g of vegan cream cheese (I used two packets of Sainsbury’s Deliciously Free From Cream Cheese)
100g icing sugar
100g caster sugar
8 tbsps coconut oil
4 tbsps vegan chocolate spread (I used Essential Organic Dark Chocolate Spread)
To make the base, crumble the biscuits into a bowl. To make them into crumbs you can bash them with a potato masher or the flat end of a rolling pin, mash them with a fork or get your blender going, it’s up to you!
When they’re nice and crumby, add the sugar and cocoa powder and stir well. Melt the coconut oil on the stove or carefully in the microwave, unless you’ve set up kitchen in the middle of Mordor and it’s melted anyway. Stir the melted oil into the biscuit mix. Take a spring-bottomed cake tin and spoon in the mixture, pressing it down with the back of a large spoon until it’s smooth. Pop it in the fridge to set.
Now for the topping. In a clean bowl mix together the soft cheese and the caster sugar. In a separate bowl cream the coconut oil and icing sugar together. It helps if the coconut oil is slightly softened but not runny, again setting up kitchen in Mordor may help here but remember to watch for marauding orcs! If that sounds like too much trouble you can of course give it a quick round in the microwave. Add the icing sugar slowly, a teaspoon or two at a time, until the mixture is soft and fluffy. Congratulations, you just made vegan buttercream!
Add this to the cheese mixture and stir well. Finally, add in the chocolate spread. Thanks to the unpredictable nature of coconut oil, your mixture may be a little lumpy, if this is the case grab your hand blender and start mixing! Take your biscuit mixture out of the fridge and carefully pour the chocolate cheese blend on top. Leave to set for one to three hours.
I don’t have any pictures of the cake after I took it out of the tin because it got…eaten! As a variation you can break up some cinder toffee or honeycomb on top which gives it a nice texture.
Full disclosure: You may have to play around with the amount of coconut oil in this recipe before you get the right consistency. My topping was perfect but my base was a little to crumbly. tasty, but deconstructed. But better to have a crumbly bottom that’s accessible to vegans (ooh, matron!) than a firm one that isn’t!
500 Things To Do With Facon 