Recipe: Vegan Valentine’s Cheesecake

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!

Review: Quorn Vegan Fishless Fingers

Buena Serra my little huevos! Some of you might have seen that Quorn has recently expanded its range of products to include a vegan line, including Vegan Fishless Fingers.

I was pretty keen to try them out when I first saw them on supermarket shelves.  Because I was brought up eating fish, and occasionally get aquatic cravings, fake fish products are one of my most sought after veggie substitutes.  VBites  do a pretty good range (their Fishless Steaks are incredible) and Fry’s do a Battered Prawn-Style product which is very nice.  Unfortunately, it stops about there.  Although Linda McCartney used to do Scampi-Style and Battered Prawn-Style products they were both discontinued, which is a real shame as they were delicious.  It seems like there just isn’t the same demand for fake-fish as there is for fake-meat, maybe because a high proportion of meat substitutes are bought by meat eaters because of the health value, and fish is healthier to begin with? I’m just speculating.  On to the Quorn review!

I tried cooking the Fingers two different ways.  Firstly on the grill, as an accompaniment to chips and peas for dinner.  They tasted good dunked in some tartar sauce, although my grill left them a little squashed (I use a George Foreman. All five of George Foreman’s sons are also called George. FACT).

The second time I cooked them in the oven to use in a sarnie and the results were slightly better, although they took a little longer to cook.  They taste very similar to the VBites ones; they’re tasty but they’re not especially fishy.  However, I would choose them over VBites as the crispy coating is better and more reminiscent of actual Fish Fingers, they come frozen so are easier to keep and I think they’re slightly larger, but without both to hand I can’t make a proper comparison.  The real clincher for Quorn though is the fact you can find these on most larger supermarket shelves and VBites, particularly their fish products, are still a bit tricky to come by.

I’ll be back next time with my Valentine’s Baking Blog 🙂  In the mean time, get some fish-free goodness in your life, yo!