This isn’t quite the post I was planning on for today. What I planned was sharing about was being a stand-in parent. One of the boys I used to work with was supposed to come up with his girlfriend to visit me to today. Of course he’s not really a boy anymore. He’s almost 25 and since I don’t work with him anymore, he tends to call me Mom. So, I’ll save that for another day.
The last month or so, I’ve been messing around with raw recipes in preparation for next month’s blog event, April In The Raw, hosted by Brittany of Real Sustenance.
I started off by working on a vision Chaz had after I made a raw pie last year and created a raw coconut crust to go with the filling recipe by Carrie at Ginger Lemon Girl. He wanted a pineapple filling using agar agar to thicken the filling. Well, I did some research and high acidic fruits like pineapple need to be cooked when using agar agar. So that was out of the question. Instead I used coconut cream concentrate. I liked it, but it wasn’t sweet enough for Chaz and he felt the crust was missing something, even though it was the same crust I made before.
Then, Iris (The Daily Dietribe) and Brittany got raw cake into my head after discussing with them on Facebook that I haven’t had cake in over a year. Gluten-free cake is not new to me at all. In fact, I found a recipe for a Chocolate Chinchilla years ago that I’ve made a few times for a friend with Celiac. He loves it. I turned the raw cake idea over and over and over again in the noggin before trying it. My macadamia nut cream turned out a little runny so the cake didn’t set well, but it had a great flavor. I will have to get more pineapple and macadamia nuts to try it again.
I attempted a mango coconut ice cream the other day. I loved the flavor of it before I put it in the freezer. I didn’t add anything to sweeten it, so of course it wasn’t sweet enough for Chaz, again. While it was in the freezer, I had ideas of cutting into the other mango I had for garnish and soaking it in mango rum or spiced rum and then topping the ice cream with it. By the time I got home from work the next day, the ice cream was rock solid. If I had popsicle molds they would have been perfect. Almost. From what I could chip off to get a taste, some of the natural sweetness was gone.
Today, I went round two with the ice cream and cake. The ice cream is still mango coconut, just changed it up a little. The cake is a Peppermint Mocha Truffle. Truffle might be stretching it a bit, but that was my initial inspiration. The batter for the cake was amazingly like real cake batter and I figure if it doesn’t set right, I can always bake it and give you a flourless cake recipe!
That’s not all though. I still have other things running amok in my head. Like gluten-free poke, marinated raw fish, a favorite back home. I can’t find the seaweed I need either in town or online to ship so I’ll be winging it and hoping for the best.
*looks at the fridge wistfully, waiting for the raw desserts to be ready* Best thing about the desserts? I used raw local honey in the ice cream and pure maple syrup in the cake.
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