Blueberry raw cheesecake bites

 Good day from Steamboat, Colorado! After months of self work and all sorts of sojourns in the jungles and high altitude paradises of Central America, Delicananda travel fever has brought me to the land of plenty. I am so grateful to have found a wonderful place in Steamboat Springs to take my cooking and baking adventures further and finally get to spend long hours in the kitchen again. And even though Steamboat has an insane amount of wonderful outdoor activities to offer, I've found myself stuck in the kitchen more often than not. I've just missed cooking and baking so much that all else comes second. But I have managed to get my butt to some yoga classes and hikes, and even some wonderful 4th of July camping and river shenanigans. So all hope of making me into a river rat isn't lost. But you wanted some yummies, I hear? Let's get on with it!

Combing through the backlog of stuff I've made in the first couple of days, I chose to start the sharing with these cutesy little things. I wanted to ease my way back into the wonderful land of raw treats with a recipe that wasn't too demanding or didn't require a ridiculous amount of equipment or fancy ingredients. And what with gobbling up all blueberries I could get my hands on after being deprived of my favourite berry for so long, this lovely recipe from one of my favourite blogs Comfy belly was an almost self-evident way to get the raw ball rolling again, so to say.

I halved the recipe and made some modifications, and used a loaf pan to make the cake. You could use a springform, or whatever suits your fancy. I chose to cut the deliciousness into small bite size pieces, but you could make bars, or use cookie cutters to make little hearts or unicorns or whatever your heart desires. The choices are endless :)

The base was a tad too sweet for my liking, but everyone else seemed to think it was wonderful. So, if your sweet tooth isn't as sweet, you could get away with less maple syrup. I also added a middle layer of lightly salted and roasted seeds for extra crunch and a tad of saltiness, which I always love and adore in my sweets. I made cashew yoghurt at the same time with the cake, so the amount of cashews called for in this recipe is the soaked amount, and since I sadly still haven't figured out how much cashews expand when soaked, I can't really tell how much dry cashews you should use. But that's the wonderful thing about raw baking: you're not going to have a disaster in your hands even if you use a slightly different amount of ingredients. Something I really appreciate especially after my first few attempts at regular baking in high altitude that turned out... well, interesting ;). Trial and error, eh?

Blueberry raw cheesecake

Base

1 c almond meal

1/4 tsp salt

1 tsp ground ginger

3/4 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp cacao powder

3 tbsp maple syrup 

2 tbsp coconut oil, melted


Middle layer

roasted and lightly salted pumpkin and sunflower seeds 


Cake layer

1,3 c soaked cashews

0,4 dl (a bit over a half of 1/3 cup :D) coconut oil, melted

0,4 dl lime juice 

dash of salt

2,5 tbsp honey

1/2 tsp vanilla extract


Topping

fresh blueberries 


Mix all base ingredients in a bowl. Adjust sweetness if necessary. Pat the dough into a pan of choice.

Sprinkle seeds on top.

Blend all cake layer ingredients until smooth. Spread onto the base.

Sprinkle blueberries on top and press lightly into the cake mass.

Freeze until set (4-ish hours), cut up and gobble up!
  

Snickers bites

Everyone likes Snickers, right? At least I do. There's something magical about the scrumptious get-together of salty peanut, caramel and chocolate. The ingredients in the normal Snickers, though? Less magical.

So,  let's make a goodie version out of the teeth-jarringly sweet snack bar, shall we?

Syötävän hyvä beat me to it again. Or inspired me to get snickering in the first place, actually. I chose to take the "cover everything in double chocolate" route (because, why not?). And it was good and bad at the same time. Good, because more chocolate = more chocolate. Bad, because in this case, as I doubled the chocolate amount, I added way more sweetener than I should have. Also, the honey I was using was a spreadable type, not the runny one. So the chocolate became super thick. Yummy, but very very super honeylicious and thick.

I felt slightly sick after a few samples. to be honest ;). But what wouldn't I do for the sake of experimenting! Now I know. Next time: start easy on the honey. Or use maple syrup. Or coconut syrup.

I also decided to go for bite size goodies instead of full bars, since nobody could eat a whole bar of this stuff (or if they could, I'd very much like to see that). And I even halved the bites in the end. So these were more candies than bars in the end, but hey, more for everyone!

Next time I'd also like to get the chocolate a bit crunchier, which would probably mean less sweetener, more cacao butter. Something to think about, for the next time around.

I bought unroasted and unsalted peanuts, but ended up roasting and salting them :D. So, just buying the regular ones would probably have made more sense. But making stuff from scratch is also fun. At least I didn't grow the peanut trees (bushes? where do they grow?) myself :D

Snickers bites

Base

1 dl peanut butter

2 tbsp liquid sweetened (I chose maple syrup)

2 tbsp almond meal

(a dash of salt if using unsalted peanut butter)

Filling

8 soft dates, pitted

1 tbsp coconut oil

1 tbsp water

dash of vanilla powder

dash of salt

peanuts on the top (unroasted and unsalted or the normal ones)

Coating (for the double chocolatey way)

6 tbsp melted cacao butter (melt in a double boiler)

2-4 tbsp liquid sweetened (I used honey and 4 tbsp was way too much)

6 tbsp raw cacao powder

dash of vanilla powder

Line a freezer box/suitable container (ca. 10 x 20 cm) with baking paper. Mix the base ingredients. Spoon into the container and flatten out. Put in the freezer.

Mush the filling ingredients into a smooth paste with a hand mixer. Spoon on top of the base, spread out evenly. Press a desired amount of peanuts on top and stick in  the freezer for a couple of hours (or overnight).

Make the chocolate coating by mixing the ingredients together. Add sweetener if desired, but take heed from my mistake and start with a smaller amount. Lift the frozen snickers chunk out of the container using the baking paper. Cut into bars or bites. 

Dip bites in the chocolate and, ideally, lift onto a rack to drain. If, like me, you don't own a full set of praline making goodies which includes a fancy rack, just let a little of the excess chocolate drain back into the bowl and then set the bites on a plate and watch the excess choco melt into a charming little puddle around them.

Put back into the freezer and take out only as much as you're serving: the chocolate starts melting quite quickly. If you're particular about the look of the bites, you can cut out the excess chocolate from around the bites if you want them to resemble squares more than blobs. I tried my best, but since my chocolate was very thick, my bites remained adorably plump :).

Heavenly soft licorice chocolate truffles

Oh my Gods, my mouth starts watering when I even think about these wonderful little balls. I had some licorice powder left from the best licorice chocolate mudcake ever that I wanted to use for a light little snacky something. So, *Internet scour*, and ta-da: Syötävän hyvä delivers again. This one is actually not her recipe, but comes from the kitchen of the lovely Hannamari of Yellow mood. She's published a nifty little book about the ABCs of raw baking and these delicious treats are featured there.

So, without further ado, 1-2-3, bake! I added the ingredients into a blender, but the heat apparently did its thing, as all the mass was literally swimming in oil by the time I was done. I tried to massage it into the mass but it just wouldn't stick. So I poured the rest of it off and still the mass was the oiliest thing ever. I already thought I'd lost this round of the game, but I decided I'd let the freezer try to persuade the little beasties that were huddling together, not very keen to keep their ball shape.

So, a round of freezing and a round of reforming into balls the next day, and a round of rolling them in cacao powder. And, Oh My Sweet Soft Truffle Gods. The consistency was absolutely silky, the licorice flavour bursted into a dark symphony in the mouth after the initial tartness of chocolate powder, and I could have easily eaten the whole container full of the balls on one go. They only remained as balls in the fridge, though, and started to get soft the minute I got them out, but they were so absolutely wonderfully delicious that I couldn't have cared less. The mass was actually so pliable at this stage that I could have formed a bunch of licorice sculptures out of it, or little cups, or whatever people make out of Play Doh (I was never very talented with the stuff). I made a couple of hearts.


So, I was definitely not sorry that something weird happened with the blending process. Sometimes the almost-disastrous version turns out to be infinitely better than the one that was sought after. I might try to do these another time, just to see if I can get the "normal", not Play Doh type consistency to work. But if not, hey, there will be another round of something truly delicious to nibble on.

Silky soft licorice chocolate truffles

Recipe here on Syötävän hyvä

3 dl cashews

1 dl coconut oil, melted

3/4 dl honey/coconut nectar/maple syrup 

5 tbsp licorice (root) powder

3/4 tsp salt

Optional: contents of 5 medicinal coal capsules for black colour (I didn't use it)

Cacao powder/licorice powder for coating

Add all ingredients into a blender and blend until smooth. If you blend too long, it might be that the consistency turns into a ball of dough swimming in a pool of oil. If this happens, drain the excess oil. Form into small balls and stick into the freezer for ca. half an hour.

Original recipe had the truffles rolled in licorice powder, but since I ran out I used cacao, and boy was the match of chocolate and licorice heavenly! So, your choice: add either licorice powder or cacao on a plate and coat the balls in the powder. Store in the fridge, if there are any left after you're done with the game of "just a little taste more".

Raw brownie bites

I was originally supposed to return from my Asia trip in July, but in the end the choice between one more month in Asia and a longer summer in Europe was an easy one. Especially Finland is amazing in the summer: there's nothing quite like the light summer nights, the rich and fresh smell of the forest after the rain and the possibility to spend some time at the summer house. Such peace and quiet is hard to find anywhere else.

Midnight

The cooking and baking facilities at the summer house are of course a bit more modest than in the city, so I came prepared: I blended some nuts already before we left and only planned to make something that needed minimal time in the kitchen and minimal amount of washing-up.

Raw brownies seemed like an excellent way to give some rich counterbalance to the fresh berries, salad and smoked fish we were having. And the dollop of sweet and creamy coconut whipped cream didn't exactly ruin the lovely little squares, either. Have I mentioned, how I'm a complete coconut junkie? Well, if I haven't then now you know. Hi, I'm Lilje, and I'm a coconut-holic. Give it to me in every form and consistency and I'll gobble it up like there's no tomorrow. In fact, I'm sipping coconut water as I write this post, and there's a new delicacy waiting to be blogged about in the fridge, where one of the main ingredients is coconut oil. But there are worse things to be hooked on than coconut, right? (Ok yes let's not mention chocolate in this context now, shall we?)

But I digress. Back to the brownies. They were really really good, and the yield of the recipe is perfect for a couple of days snacking for 2 people or a little sample for more people. I chose to make the brownies bite sized since they are quite rich, which was a good decision (and then you can have more pieces! Yay!) And the coconut cream really is a very nice addition, highly recommended.

The recipe is, surprise surprise, again from Syötävän hyvä. That girl is a powerhouse when it comes to amazing recipes and lovely food photography. Enjoy!

Raw brownies

(about 9 small squares)

Brownies

1 dl pecan nuts

a generous dl fresh, pitted dates

3 tbsp raw cacao powder

1 tbsp coconut oil, melted

a dash of salt

Topping

0,5 dl fresh, pitted dates

1 tbsp raw cacao powder

1 tbsp coconut oil, melted

ca. 2 tbsp water

Throw the nuts into a blender and blend till small but not yet powdery. Add dates, cacao powder and coconut oil and blend to a soft mass. I used a hand mixer, since I hate using blenders for date mixes (it just never works!). Also the hand mixer had a little hard time with the heavy mass, so if you have a small food processor attachment to your hand mixer, that might be the best option. Sweeten if desired, but the dates give ample sweetness in my opinion. Press the mass to the bottom of a rectangular/square dish.

Prepare the topping by mushing the ingredients together with a hand mixer. Add water till the consistency is spreadable-soft but not runny. Spread on top of the brownie mass. Put in the freezer until set (about an hour). Cut into cubes and store in the fridge. Serve with whipped coconut cream!