hsapiens | Vegan Dessert Ideas?

I have a vegan on my giftlist this year and it has been a long time since I was vegan. From back in my days, I recall that it was a downer to have lots of festive food occasions around the holidays and not participate. I also recall that baking for vegans involved complex recipes, exotic ingredients, and never turned out very well. Has vegan baking gotten easier? I'd love to bake something special for her.

Anyone got any favored recipes? (I know I have at least one vegan on my f-list.) Suggestions for sites to visit for good recipes? I don't have a lot of time to experiment so I'm hoping to hit paydirt quickly. Any tips on making vegan baked goods? Extra points for chocolate desserts since she's a chocoholic.

I've thought of things like sugared nuts but I really wanted to go with something that seemed more...planned. Planned isn't exactly what I mean; it's hard to describe but if you've ever had a meal of piles of vegetables rather than a planned meal, you know that it's unsatisfying and gets old. I'm trying to make this something special.

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Sadly, they call for milk. I wonder if you could use soy milk, though. Umm... I'll get you the recipe and you can try the soy milk, if you think it would work. I'd love to hear the results. :-) The milk is in there to blend with the sugar and make an almost praline like coating on the nuts. I've never used soy so I have *no* idea if it would work or not.

OH! What about a fruit tort? I'm sure you could come up with some sort of crust (maybe an all vegetable cookie crumb recipe or something). Then it would be fruit with a sugar glaze. www.foodtv.com probably has some recipes that you could easily adapt.

Then there's always the Whole Foods bakery. :-):-) Central Market, maybe?

The Whole Foods bakery doesn't actually do much in the way of vegan baking. They have yummy, yummy stuff, but mostly not vegan. (Except their gourmet marshmallows. Yummy!)

Anything fruit pie/tart/crumble related should work, as the only dairy generally in the crust part is butter. That is easily replaced (as I mentioned below) with soy margarine.

And then serve it with a dairy-free dark chocolate bar. Yeah. :)

Wait - Whole Foods has vegetarian marshmallows?!? How have I missed this? I adore marshmallows and it's one thing I truly miss. (Not enough to buy agar and make them myself, obviously, but I do stare longingly at packages of marshmallows several times a year.) I haven't had a marshmallow in almost 18 years -- but maybe that'll change tonight. :)

A fruit crumble is definitely my back-up plan because I'm wary of making crust with ersatz stuff. It often contains the wrong percentage of moisture, with too much of that being water, and makes crust a dicey proposition at best.

And then serve it with a dairy-free dark chocolate bar
Perhaps I should have mentioned that this is to be shipped rather than served? There's also the whole issue of packaging this stuff to ship. But I figure that's relatively easy. Finding something tasty and vegan and baked? That's the tough one. But I could easily add in a couple of chocolate bars as sort of "holiday care package." Oh! Thanks for that idea!

They're very fancy vegan marshmallows. But they are very good. And they come in flavors. :) There is a cute cafe in the West Village that does this, too. They have coconut ones. Yu-um!

I have to admit that there are occasions when I let myself "forget" that marshmallows aren't vegan when I use them for a particular holiday dessert. There are a couple of food items like that where, once or twice a year, I will put on my, "La la la not listening to you," hat and indulge.

Mmmmm. Sounds yummy. What a shame I have to stop there and pick up some milk on the way home. ;-)

It's hard, at times, to find the right personal path. My priorities shift or I realize that some things are more important to me than I'd realized. I was recently faced with the need to provide cheese for a group function and one kind (can't remember which) wasn't available in a vegetarian option when I was at the store. Buying Kraft because of their support for the GLBT community and the way they told the AFA where to stick it made me much happier about full-cruelty, non-veggie cheese. I still didn't eat it, but...

Actually, I bet almond milk would work REALLY well. Please do share the recipe. For myself, I buy so-called organic milk and the nuts really do sound like something I would like. :)

I'll dig it up and try to send it to you this weekend. If not, I'll at least have it for you by next weekend. :-) You'd think after all these years I'd remember it, but I can never remember if it's six tablespoons of milk to six cups of nuts or three cups of nuts and is that a cup of sugar or two. I make various sized batches and that screws up my memory of the proportions. ;-)

Vegan Dessert Ideas?

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