These are slightly different from my other cookie recipes – they’re NYC-style: enormous, and molten and tender, to the point where they very nearly collapse when lifted. They’re saturated with chocolate and have the delicious crunch of walnuts and a touch of sea salt to counteract their sweetness.
This cheesecake speaks for itself. It combines my three of my favourite things: lotus biscuits, white chocolate and passionfruit. The lotus biscuits make the perfect base, providing an almost umami, caramelised base.
The cake is tender and chocolatey and, when cut open, reveals a molten centre. The raspberries add that vital fresh astringency to cut through the sweetness and make a second piece impossibly hard to resist.
Once again, this recipe comes with a disclaimer that despite being vegan, the cake does not vaguely taste “vegan”.
Checkerboard Cookies: This cookie is partially inspired my nostalgia for playdough, and partially by my extreme jubilation about the fact that Drag Race (both UK & US editions) has just started again (the cookies represent the Drag Race flags that Ru Paul holds, obviously). If you like either of those things, especially playdough, are feeling crafty, and/or are seeking some fun on day 323 of lockdown, then these cookies are for you.
if I have a vegan chocolate cake, it needs to meet or surpass its non-vegan equivalent in taste, in texture and in appearance.
And, it most certainly cannot have any weird artificial or suspicious gunk holding it together.
Anyway, I stumbled across a basic recipe online: it came out disturbingly black, and tasted acrid. And I tried an online vegan icing recipe: it was revoltingly oily, and tear-inducingly bitter. So, I’ve chopped and changed and adjusted and refined, and this is the result: cupcakes that are juicy, fluffy, tender, and moist, with a smooth, creamy chocolatey icing.
They are so good that I guarantee no one will guess they’re vegan.
These cookies are thick; they’re chewy; and they have a a molten Nutella centre with oozy chocolate and crunchy toasted hazelnuts. I’m not even going to feign modesty: these cookies are the apotheoses of cookies. Make sure you have at least two reserved per person because eating one is never going to be enough – be warned.
In my dictionary definition of cookie, I’m going to be demanding. It needs to be thic(ccc)k so that each mouthful contains some of the promised flavours, be they chocolate, nut, or candy. I want it crisp on the outside so that when broken, it gives way to a chewy cookie-dough goo. If there’s chocolate or caramel, they need to be molten. They also need to have enough salt to balance the sweetness and add depth of flavour.
And, after years of trials, the quest to create the perfect cookie becoming increasingly Sisyphean, I’ve done it. And you need to make them ASAP.
I wanted chocolate. I wanted peanuts. I wanted caramel. And so came together three revered ingredients to make this simple but deeply luscious dessert. I admit to a glimmer of inspiration from the Season 11 contestant of RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant, the drag queen with the moniker Silky Nutmeg Ganache. But apart from that, I attribute this recipe to greed.
These are slightly different from my other cookie recipes – they’re NYC-style: enormous, and molten and tender, to the point where they very nearly collapse when lifted. They’re saturated with chocolate and have the delicious crunch of walnuts and a touch of sea salt to counteract their sweetness.