Blueberry Orange Vegan "Cheesecake"

I've been seeing A LOT of raw vegan cheesecakes on instagram, and felt like I should give them a go. They look pretty and who'd say no to a healthy dessert? Alright, truth be told, many would because they'd think it wouldn't taste good. But not me!

So I googled around and found a few recipes. I studied them and found that they are all rather similar, but I eventually settled on this one because it used homemade coconut butter and did not require the use bananas (I just didn't want to buy bananas) or alternative sugars.





The unfortunate thing, though, was that I couldn't get my food processor to make the coconut butter. It kept overheating, and there was nothing I could do to turn it into coconut butter. I was tempted to add some water but it seemed fr the author's post that there shouldn't be moisture? ╯﹏╰

Since making my own homemade coconut butter failed rather miserably, I got my hands on Coconut Oil at Cold Storage. $13-$14 for 375ml! That's about 1.5 cups. 

Expensive Coconut Oil

Because the recipe uses 1/2 cup coconut oil and I didn't want to use up 1/3 of the bottle, not knowing if it would turn out as expected, or if my food processor would overheat again, I halved the recipe. 

That was a great decision, in my opinion, cos that produced one 6 inch cake and two small (prob) 3.5inch mini cakes. 

Not very pretty, but I wanted to remember how tall this cake is. It actually looks taller than it actually is.

I could probably have made a super tall 6 inch cake, but I liked the idea of small cakes so I could taste them without cutting into the big ones. In the end, though, I think the tiny cakes are cuter. Seems like I need to buy more straight edged moulds. I made one in a round muffin cup (lined with aluminum foil so I could remove the frozen cake with ease - again a great idea cos I could just peel off the paper. Only thing was that the edges of the cakes were crumpled. 

I also made two changes to the recipe - I used BAM dates (from NTUC at Clementi Mall) and replaced lemon with orange. 

Whizzing up the base

To be honest, I didn't have much hopes for this cake, because I was tasting it while whizzing up the ingredients. The base tasted ok, just super nutty. I reckon you need to use nuts that you love to eat raw.

The filling was terrible before it was chilled. I could only taste the coconut oil, and couldn't taste the orange at all. 

BUT!! After it was in the freezer overnight, I unmoulded it and let it defrost a little on the counter (actually I was just taking photos of it. *laughs*), it tasted great! ^^

Grace Jie and Mom said it was delicious too!