Category Archives: Desserts

Chocolate Peanut Butter Rice Krispie Treats, Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, and Vegan

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Chocolate Peanut Butter Rice Krispie Treats, Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, VeganWhat’s another quick and easy rice krispie treat recipe between friends? After all, today’s dairy-free, gluten-free, and (optionally) vegan recipe combines chocolate and peanut butter, which we all know is a match made in delicious heaven.

In the past, I’ve made both traditional and vegan rice krispie treats, multiple peanut butter rice krispie treats, toffee rice krispies treats, rice krispies treats using Special K cereal, and even a baked chocolate coconut bar topped with rice bubble icing.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Rice Krispie Treats, Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, VeganYet for all my years of stirring together puffed rice cereal, sweetener of the maple syrup, marshmallow, or honey kind, and various additional funtimes! ingredients, I’ve never once opted for the classic, addictive, moreish, oh-it’s-just-so-good duet of peanut butter and chocolate.

That had to change. So it changed. I can now proudly present to you this easy yet spectacular recipe for gluten-free, dairy-free, and vegan (if you eat honey/swap the honey for brown rice syrup) Chocolate Peanut Butter Rice Krispie Treats.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Rice Krispie Treats, Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, VeganThese rice krispies treats are really good, my friends. Opting for unsweetened dark chocolate adds depth and complexity to the final flavour, but feel free to use an 85% or 70%, or even a sweeter, chocolate if your tastes swing that way.

I’m going try making this with almond or cashew butter next (time I win the lottery).

Chocolate Peanut Butter Rice Krispie Treats, Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free, Vegan

Original recipe

  • 1/2 cup (155g) honey (use brown rice syrup for vegan)
  • 1/3 cup + 1 tablespoon (100g) peanut butter
  • 1 tablespoon coconut oil
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 3 cups (90g) rice krispies/bubbles (certified gluten-free if needed)
  • 1 ounce (28g) unsweetened dark chocolate (I used Baker’s), finely chopped
  1. Line a 20cm/8 inch square tin with parchment paper.
  2. In a medium-large saucepan over medium heat, stir together the honey, peanut butter, coconut oil, and vanilla extract until melted together and smooth.
  3. Take the saucepan off the heat and tip in the rice krispies and finely chopped chocolate, stirring gently until all the cereal is coated in the melted peanut butter mixture.
  4. Spoon the rice krispie mixture into prepared tin and pat down evenly. Place in fridge to set, then cut into squares and store in an air-tight container in the fridge or freezer (I’m sure you could also leave it out at room temperature, but I’ve not yet done this myself.)
  5. Sweet dreams are made of this.

Submitted to Healthy Vegan Friday.

No-Bake Vegan Chocolate Peanut Butter Brulée Bars

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No-Bake Vegan Chocolate Peanut Butter Brulée BarsLife has thrown me a curveball and I couldn’t be happier about it.

Sure, the crazy random happenstance meant that my plan to spend two days wandering around Denver between the magic whirlwind of #VVC2013 and the beginning of my US Traveling Slumber Party disappeared faster than you can say “one iced almond milk coffee and the wifi password, please”, but you know what?

I’ll take the curveball over the meandering any day. I’ve got my feet firmly planted on the ground, I’ve got an anxious nervous thrumming in my heart, I’ve still got the slumber party starting tomorrow (ain’t no curveball changin’ that), and I’ve got the memory of these fabulous no-bake vegan chocolate peanut butter brulée bars to keep me going.

No-Bake Vegan Chocolate Peanut Butter Brulée BarsI’ve spent the past half hour searching my computer for the recipe I know I wrote up somewhere, but no matter how many times I type “dates”, “peanut butter”, “cocoa” or “OKAY COMPUTER YOU WIN YOU’RE THE BEST AT HIDE AND SEEK” into the search box, I can’t find it.

But it was simple, really. I put a cup or so of pitted Medjool dates, almost as much but not quite of salted roasted peanuts, a few spoonfuls of peanut butter, a dash of vanilla, and a spoon of cocoa powder into a food processor, then pulsed the lot until it formed a sticky, cohesive ball.

No-Bake Vegan Chocolate Peanut Butter Brulée BarsI pressed the mixture into a lined pan and then, because I was worried that the salted peanuts were countering the caramel sweetness of the dates a little too well, I sprinkled  a layer of brown sugar on top and patted it in.

Voilà! Brulée! (Yes, I’m stretching.)

I know you have it in you to make these delicious no-bake vegan chocolate peanut butter brulée bars with just the prior words as guidance.

Pretend I’m pitching you a recipe curveball. A no-recipe curveball, that is.

Catch it. Leap around with it. Eat it (the recipe, not the curveball). It’s delicious. Life is swell. Who needs sleep, anyway?

Forward ho!

Submitted to Healthy Vegan Fridays and Allergy-Friendly Lunchbox Love.

Vegan Chocolate Coconut Ice

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Vegan Chocolate Coconut Ice

I miss primary school fêtes. I miss how the schoolyard looked and felt different when visited on the weekend in the sunshine, how the tables in the quadrangle adorned with homemade treats or “trash and treasure” seemed more alluring than any shopping mall ever could, and how much fun it was to run around wildly with friends without having to worry about a teacher yelling at us for going out of bounds.

I miss putting so much tomato sauce onto my sausage sizzle sausage that the flimsy white bread beneath grew soggy (but tangy!), and I miss buying a toffee cup for ten cents; I miss those toffee cups in muffin cases that were nothing more than caster sugar, water, and food colouring boiled together into discs then topped with sprinkles, ready to be sucked on for hours (or until accidentally dropped it in the dirt while playing tag).

Vegan Chocolate Coconut IceThere would always be at least one plate of coconut ice on the tables selling homemade goodies. A uniquely Australian treat, coconut ice is traditionally a pink and white layered confection made from coconut, copha, red food colouring, and either sweetened condensed milk or icing sugar and egg white.

Coconut ice is sweet, so sweet, and pretty, so pretty, and coconutty, so coconutty.

A few months ago, I remembered the existence of coconut ice and could suddenly think of naught but veganising it with the help of my enormous jar of coconut oil. In a vague nod towards being a Grown-Up rather than an seven-year-old girl with a sticky disc of half-licked toffee in her hand, I replaced the food colouring with cocoa powder and took the resulting gluten-free, dairy-free, definitely-not-sugar-free treat into work.

My colleagues may not have the same school fête memory associations with this vegan chocolate coconut ice as I do, but they seemed to love eating it all the same.

Vegan Chocolate Coconut Ice

Vegan Chocolate Coconut Ice

Makes 16-20 squares, or more if you prefer teensy bites.
Adapted from Taste

  • 250g desiccated coconut
  • 500g pure icing sugar, sifted
  • 200g coconut oil
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 2 tablespoons cocoa powder
  1. Line a 20cm (8 inch) square pan with non-stick baking paper, allowing paper to overhang the sides. In a large bowl, stir together the coconut and icing sugar.
  2. Melt the coconut oil in a medium saucepan over low heat, then add the vanilla extract. Immediately pour this over the coconut and sugar mixture, then stir stir stir stir stir! It may take a bit of elbow grease to get all the sugar and coconut incorporated into the coconut oil.
  3. Once the mixture is combined and cohesive, divide in half. Press one half smoothly and evenly into prepared pan. Add the cocoa to the remaining half, and mix well until the coconut is evenly coloured.
  4. Press the chocolate coconut mixture over the layer already in the pan, then cover with plastic wrap and place in the fridge for 1 hour or until set.
  5. Remove the coconut ice from the pan, and use a sharp knife to cut into small squares. Store in the fridge. You can either serve this straight-crispy-hard-cold from the fridge, or let it soften a little at room temperature first.
  6. Are you done yet? Have you finished eating? Can we go play Red Light, Green Light in the schoolyard now, please?

Submitted to Healthy Vegan Friday, Allergy-Friendly Lunchbox Love and 5 Ingredient Monday.

Salted Caramel Brownies

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Salted Caramel Brownies

Welcome. Would you like a slab of salted caramel brownie?

We could also call this treat by a more long-winded, swankypants, and technically correct name: Fleur de Sel Caramel-Swirled Brownies.

Or maybe: David Lebovitz’ Deep Dark Rich Brownies with Trader Joe’s Fleur de Sel Caramel Sauce.

Or else: Just Seriously So Good You Need To Make These Right Now Brownies.

Salted Caramel BrowniesI mean, look at that. Look at how the caramel sauce swirled into the batter turns into pretty crevices and canyons of burnished sea salt-kissed deeply-buttery dulce de leche nestled into soft, moist, heady chocolatey goodness.

Salted Caramel BrowniesLook at how the brownies firm up in the fridge overnight to become dense squares of intense richness hiding a layer of salted caramel within as well as on top. Look, imagine, dream, make.

Make these for someone you love. For people you love. Perhaps for the wonderful people who are letting you stay with them in Southern California for a few weeks, who are catering to both your sweet tooth with endless pints of Ben and Jerry’s and your love of vegetables with 3lb bags of broccoli. For the people whose sunny backyard you’re lying down in every afternoon until the heat sears into your skin and soul, for the people whose couch you’re curling up in every morning to drink coffee and write poetry, for the people whose kindness and care is making you feel so very much at home (-away-from-home).

Make these to say thank you. Make these to say I’m happy. Make these just because.

Salted Caramel BrowniesI followed David Lebovitz’ recipe for dulce de leche brownies to make these Salted Caramel Brownies/Fleur de Sel Caramel-Swirled Brownies, using Baker’s semi-sweet chocolate and Trader Joe’s Fleur de Sel Caramel Sauce. I recommend you do the same.

Pumpkin Peanut Puff Pudding, Vegan and Gluten-free

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Pumpkin Peanut Puff Pudding, Vegan and Gluten-freeAt first glance, you may think that the above Pumpkin Peanut Puff Pudding is nothing more than an innocent sweet breakfast (or quick dessert) that ticks all the vegan, gluten-free, non-threatening, sweet yet healthful, delicious, moreish, and irresistible (particularly when topped with mini chocolate chips) boxes.

However, this breakfast/dessert is more than that. My peanut butter pumpkin pudding is a refutation, or perhaps proof positive (I haven’t quite decided yet), of Bourdieu’s theories of cultural capital and cultural hegemony, as defined and discussed in his seminal work La Distinction.

Pumpkin Peanut Puff Pudding, Vegan and Gluten-freeOn the one hand, we have ingredients liked organic canned pumpkin, unsweetened vanilla almond milk, coconut flour, and mesquite powder, all of which can be classified as luxury goods available predominately to the cultural elite: those with the money, knowledge, and leisure time to be aware of, value, and have access to products (and “tastes”) classified by society as Healthful, Prestigious and [often thereby] Tied To Moral Virtue (“you are what you eat… and what you eat should by organic/local/ethical/healthy/virtuous”).

On the other hand, I threw in peanut butter-flavoured sugary kids’ cereal, blended it all up, and topped the resulting thick and creamy pudding with chocolate chips. Which is less in line with the Eat Only Homegrown Sprouted Polka-Dot Chickpeas And Foraged-By-The-Light-Of-A-Crescent-Moon Maqui Berries strain of cultural capital, and more, well, trashy, perhaps?

Pumpkin Peanut Puff Pudding, Vegan and Gluten-freeOf course, you’re more than welcome to simply call this recipe “delicious” and have that be that. It is, after all, a tasty and nourishing creation, with the nutty maltiness of the cereal, mesquite, and coconut flour combining well with the roundness of pumpkin and your chosen extract and sweetener.

But, see, sometimes I miss academic life and how it felt to thread together the theories of Bourdieu, Veblen, Baudrillard, and Foucault in such a way as to cast light on the way our world shudders and moves around us.

So I’m calling this my Capital Pudding. Because it is both capital (ol’ chum!) and potentially reflective of class capital.

Though I still haven’t decided whether it’s more high or low culture.

Pumpkin Peanut Puff Pudding, Vegan and Gluten-free

Original recipe
Serves 1

  • 1/3 cup (heaping; 100g) pumpkin puree, canned or pureed
  • 1/2 cup unsweetened vanilla almond milk, or any non-dairy milk
  • 1/2 cup (heaping; 25g) Peanut Butter Panda Puffs, or similar peanut butter cereal (*cough Reese’s Puffs cough*)
  • 1 tb coconut flour
  • 1/4 tsp almond extract (or vanilla extract)
  • 1/4 tsp mesquite powder (or cinnamon)
  • pinch salt
  • sweetener, to taste (coconut sugar, maple or agave syrup, or stevia)
  • chocolate chips, to garnish

1. Are you ready for this? PUREE EVERYTHING (except the chocolate chips) in a blender until gloriously smooth and thick. You can now enjoy this straightaway, or put in the fridge for an hour or so, at which point the pudding will thicken up gorgeously and you will be very happy. Garnish with chocolate chips before serving.

2. “Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.” - Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories, Volume One.

Submitted to Ricki’s Wellness Weekend, Healthy Vegan Friday, Allergy-Friendly Lunchbox Love, and 5 Ingredient Monday.