Vegan nanaimo bars!

I finally decided to "bite the bullet" and try my hand at making Nanaimo bars at home. It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken's Perfect Vegan Nanaimo Bars looked promising, so I took the opportunity afforded to me by Kara's PA Day yesterday to actually make a batch. I omitted the nuts called for in the base, and used baking chocolate instead of chocolate chips, but otherwise made no changes.

I like these a lot. The bitterness of using dark chocolate provides a nice balance to what would otherwise likely be too sweet a dessert for my liking. Matt pointed out that the base is a bit thicker than most, and I think he's right. I'd probably scale everything back to 75% there if I make these again. I'd also like to experiment with making an ermine frosting/custard middle layer — I feel that the middle layer wasn't as thick as it often is, but I wouldn't want to add more sugar to that layer. But I'll happily eat these as-is!

Homemade baklava!

I had leftover phyllo after having made the me-friendly Can't Get Knafeh of It chocolate bar, so after slicing an additional 70g off for the purposes of making a second bar if I so choose, I was left with 340g or about 75% of a full recipe's worth of phyllo for Fifteen Spatulas' homemade Baklava recipe. I'd made it in the past — substituting in a mix of pumpkin and sunflower seeds for the nuts — and was very pleased with the results. Kara, however, is not a fan of sweetened citrus, so she asked that that component be omitted in the future. Here are the ingredient amounts and substitutions I used for this reduced-sized batch (which was baked in two loaf pans, rather than one large pan):

Filling (of which 150g went unused, so everything here can be reduced to 70%)

• 500g raw, hulled, unsalted sunflower seeds
• 1 ½ tsp ground cinnamon
• ¼ tsp fresh-ground cardamom (husks removed)
• ¼ tsp fresh-ground cloves
• ¼ tsp salt

Pastry component

• 340g phyllo dough
• 95g vegan butter, melted

Syrup

• ¾ cup water
• ¾ cup sugar
• ½ cup honey
• 1 cinnamon stick

I think I'd like to try halving the amount of sugar in the sugar/honey syrup next time, since the dessert's a bit sweeter than I typically prefer, but I admit that the overall flavour profile has mellowed since we had our first slices last night after dinner. It seems less sweet today.

Just can't get (vegan, allergen-free) knafeh

It's been a long time since I first heard of the "Viral Dubai" (ugh)/FIX Dessert Can't Get Knafeh of It chocolate bar. Obviously, a bar that uses tree nuts, sesame and dairy wasn't going to work well for me regardless, so I was happy to see that there were creators like Emmymade who were sharing their homemade recipes for the dessert. Emmy's video in particular confirmed that the textural experience alone was worth attempting to adapt this treat to my sensitivities at least once.

So I had Caty order the Fidqiog Chocolate Bar Mold for me when she recently had Amazon Prime. I also made sure I had phyllo dough on-hand, a jar of pumpkin seed butter, cocoa butter, dairy-free chocolate and a good quality plant-based butter.

Caty got the mold to me at Em and Austin's housewarming party this past Saturday and I had the time to be able to assemble a bar today. Here are the ingredients I used:

Pumpkin Seed Cream (Pistachio Cream substitute)

• 55g 42g cocoa butter
• 125g 95g pumpkin seed butter
• 25g 20g icing sugar
• additional sugar to taste (I added 4g 3g granulated sugar to the complete filling mix)

Crispy, feuilletine-inspired kaitifi

• 30g 23g vegan butter
• 25g 20g granulated sugar
• 70g 53g knife-shredded phyllo pastry

Also

• 250g dairy-free chocolate

Method:

1. In a double boiler, melt cocoa butter over medium heat. Add pumpkin seed butter and stir until well incorporated. Sift in icing sugar. Stir well. Set aside.
2. In a shallow pan, melt vegan butter over medium-low heat. Add sugar and watch until sugar becomes golden. Take off heat and immediately add kaitifi/shredded phyllo pastry. Toss pastry to coat. Set aside to cool.
3. Taste a small amount of the golden kaitifi. If it's not crispy, spread the pastry shreds out on a parchment-lined baking sheet and bake at 350°F until golden brown. Set aside to cool.
4. When kaitifi is cooled down, stir into the pumpkin seed cream. Taste. Add additional sugar as necessary to sweeten the filling as desired.
5. In a double boiler, melt chocolate over medium-low heat, stirring as necessary to ensure smoothness. If required, temper chocolate.
6. Pour chocolate into mold, then turn mold to coat the insides. Allow to set for approximately 5 minutes. Pour excess chocolate back out into a separate bowl.
7. Cool mold in the fridge for approximately 5 minutes to set the top and sides of the chocolate bar.
8. Spoon filling into bottom of the mold. Chill for an additional 5-15 minutes to set the filling.
9. Pour the remaining chocolate over the bottom of the bar (the top of the mold), scrape off excess. Chill for approximately 5 minutes until set.

This makes a big bar of chocolate. Matt, Kara and I each had ⅓ of a row (each row is ⅕ of the total bar) for each of the two servings we shared today.

I really enjoy the way the flavours and textures come together here, and I think adding a hard-crack caramel to the kaitifi component is the way to go; it adds extra crunch to the experience, which I think saves it from resembling the "Shredded Wheat" element that others have noted. Also, I think it was the better choice that I went with a "stiffer" filling than some of the versions I've seen. This is sweet without being cloying, crispy, crunchy, gooey without being messy and blends flavours well. I could see me making this again, despite the amount of work it takes.

Next day edit: I forgot to note that I had 85g of filling left over when I made up the original batch, which I'm calculating to be about 25% of the total, so I've adjusted the filling amounts to be 75% of what I used.

Chocolate cupcakes with coffee-caramel ermine frosting

These are the go-to chocolate cupcakes that I've blogged about previously. I also thought I'd try making an ermine frosting, using Cupcake Jemma's Ermine Buttercream as my jumping-off point. Of note, the flour/sugar mixture that gets toasted in the beginning was probably starting to caramellize a bit when I added the coconut milk to it, so I accidentally ended up with a delightful caramel frosting that I also added about 1/2 tsp of of instant coffee granules to, to get a coffee-caramel result (I was inspired by our local vegan doughnut shop's chocolate coffee toffee flavoured doughnut).

The frosting turned out incredibly delicious, but — as is often the case when I'm using soy-free margarine in place of butter — the result was less firm than I was hoping for. I think I might mess around with the flour ratios in the future to try to stabilize it further. Also, the recipe makes at least three times more frosting than was necessary for a batch of a dozen cupcakes, so I could easily halve the amounts to get a good amount of frosting for a dozen cupcakes in the future. In the plus column, I now have a lot of frosting ready-to-go, in the freezer.

My version as follows:

75g All-Purpose Flour
400g Granulated Sugar
460g Coconut Milk
460g Soy-Free Vegan Margarine

Sea Salt to taste
Instant Coffee Granules to taste
1 tsp Vanilla Extract to taste