Vegan ice cream taco

Forget all the good vegan recipes you think you know for vegan waffle cones. I have found what I think to be the best one yet. It's flavoursome, crispy and can be raw too!

The recipe is from Nouveau Raw. They give you great tips for how to make waffle cones, waffle bowls and cookies. Pretty much just anything to put your ice cream into.

I love that this recipe is raw, but I didn't have the time to wait 10 hours for it to dehydrate so I put mine into the oven for an hour at 150 degrees C. But the time can vary depending on your oven. Just keep an eye on it and take it out when it is crispy enough for your liking.

I made my own adaptation to the recipe as I didn't want to make mine chocolate waffle cones. I was already going to be smothering my ice cream taco in chocolate so I figured it would be too much chocolate if I put it into the shell as well. I substituted the cocoa powder for hazelnut meal.

The ice cream taco was DELICIOUS by the way :) Deliciously unhealthy that is. I could only eat half of it in one sitting though. Iy's probably better that way. If I'd have eaten the whole thing, I'd most likely go into a month long sugar coma.

Vegan Nut Waffle Cones
Adapted from Nouveau Raw

Ingredients: 

• 3/4 cups cashews, soaked 2+ hours
• 1/2 cup flax seed, ground
• 1/2 cup hazelnut meal
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp sea salt
• 1 ripe banana
• 1/4 cup raw coconut butter or creamed coconut (pretty much just anything with both the flesh and the oil creamed together)
• 1/4 cup maple syrup
• 1/4 tsp liquid stevia (optional) - I didn't include this
• 6 cups packed, moist almond pulp

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 150C.
2. After soaking the cashews, drain and rinse them.  If you already have soaked and dehydrated cashews in the pantry, you can use those.
3. Place the cashews in the food processor, fitted with the “S” blade, and process until it resembles a small crumble.   Place in a large bowl.
4. Add the ground flax, hazelnut meal, cinnamon and salt.  Mix.  Set aside.
5. In the same food processor bowl combine the bananas, creamed coconut/coconut butter, maple syrup, and stevia (if using).  Process until creamy.   Pour over the dry ingredients, add the almond pulp and mix together with your hands working everything in together.
6. Measure out 1/4 cup of batter and roll into large balls.  Do this until all of the batter is gone.
7. To make the cone with the waffle maker:
   • Line the waffle cone machine with plastic wrap, place the ball of batter in the center and lay another piece of plastic wrap over the top.
   • Close the machine and squeeze shut.
   • Open, peel off the top piece of plastic wrap and remove the flattened waffle cone.
8.  I then used aluminium foil to make a taco shell mold and placed the flattened waffle cone in here.
9. Place the taco shell in the oven at 150C for about 45mins-1 hour but keep an eye on it and take it out when it is crispy enough for you. 

To make the ice cream taco:

• Melt a block of vegan chocolate and mix in a handful of chopped almonds or any nut of your choosing
• Once the taco shell has cooled down completely, scoop in some vegan ice cream. I mixed ice cream and banana together. 
• Coat the taco with the melted chocolate and place in the freezer for a minimum of 20 minutes. 
• Enjoy!!!

 

The Llama Bar, Subiaco

My friend once told me how much he enjoyed chips cooked in duck fat, and so for his birthday I did some searching for restaurants in Perth that served duck fat roasted chips. I could only find three places, and two of them had ridiculously high prices from the items on their menu. The only place within my price range was the Llama Bar in Subiaco. 

On Tuesdays and Wednesday they have steak night, where you can get a 250g sirloin steak, duck fat chips, salad and béarnaise sauce all for...get this...$15!! That's so cheap! All you non-vegans out there definitely need to get your next steak fix from the Llama Bar. 

The kitchen was very helpful with finding me a vegan friendly meal, and ended up making me a beautiful cabbage salad which had cabbage, red onion, capers, peas, radish and basil. It was such a lovely fresh salad which had a bit of a spicy tang to it. It was very filling too. I also ordered sweet potato crisps which were perfectly thin and crispy and so full of flavour. 

My friend ordered the braised lamb and from where I was sitting it looked so tender and moist. I'm guessing it was absolutely delicious too. 

The decor was very elegant. I was actually quite blown away by how lovely it was inside. The lighting is slightly dimmed, with a lovely glow from the lights. It's a very neat and tidy place, with lots of large pictures on the walls and flow arrangements. It seems too fancy to have meals at such reasonable prices. There was also live entertainment from a singer who had a very Regina Spektor voice. 

Unfortunately there wasn't anything vegan friendly on the dessert menu, so we headed across the road to Gelare where they had vegan ice cream! There was vegan dark chocolate and dairy-free naked coconut flavour. I had a scoop of each of course. Even though the weather was cold, it didn't matter because vegan ice cream makes me so happy.

Vegan waffle cones

I recently found out that waffle ice cream cones are not vegan friendly. Unfortunately for me, a lot of them are made with eggs. I tried doing a Google search for a vegan friendly version but didn't find many at all. 

I was determined to find a good vegan waffle cone recipe after I bought myself a waffle cone maker which was on sale for $20 from one of those home ware stores which I have now forgotten the name of. I couldn't resist the bargain because it was selling for more than half price off. Plus I thought it might be cool to make my own waffle cones. 

I eventually found a video on the Internet for vegan waffle cones from the American website News 10. The video gives step by step instructions and they turned out looking great. 

I didn't have all the ingredients that the lady from the video used, but I did my best with what I had in the pantry. 

My waffle cones turned out pretty good. The thicker you make your batter, the less crispy they will go. In the video the batter seems very thick, but it still turned out good because their waffle iron was heavier duty than mine. See how you go using either the original recipe or my adaptation of it. 

I also made some raw vegan caramel sauce and chocolate sauce to go on top :) Diabetes galore. 

 Vegan waffle cones

Ingredients

• 3/4 plain flour
• 3/4 whole wheat flour (I used wholemeal spelt)
• 1 1/2 cups powdered/icing sugar
• 1 tablespoon corn flour
• 1/2 teaspoon arrowroot
• 1/4 tablespoon cinnamon
• 2 tablespoons melted vegan margarine
• 1 1/2 cup room temp or water almond milk

Directions

1. Sift and combine all the dry ingredients and mix well.
2. Add the melted margarine to the warm almond milk (if you add the margarine to cold milk, it will curdle) and mix with dry ingredients.
3. Heat waffle iron and grease with a little bit of oil. Place about 2 tablespoons of the batter onto the iron and cook according to the manufacturer's instructions (cook for about 1 minute).
4. Take off the waffle and roll it up using a waffle cone mold. Leave to cool and harden. 
5. Fill up your cone with ice cream and enjoy. 

It's a burry photo unfortunately. It's the only one I took because I guess I was just too eager to eat it.

Vegan taro ice cream

For all those who have read my blog post about the taro chilli cakes I made, you'll know that I'm a big fan. I'm also obsessed with my ice cream maker and so I've been searching for the perfect vegan taro ice cream recipe. 

I found a good recipe for purple yam ice cream from the website Allyson Kraymer's gluten-free and vegan recipes. The recipe is simple, easy and the pictures look great too. I also recently bought low G.I confectioners sugar that I wanted to use up too so this was a good chance seeing as the recipe called for confectioners sugar rather than refined white sugar. 

My first mistake we thinking that taro could be substituted for the yams. No Theresa, no. When you put cooked taro into the food processor, it goes sticky and very very viscous. I actually overheated my Sunbeam stickmast hand blender because I had it on full speed for so long. Never again. I love that hand blender and I don't want to break it :P

When I put it through the ice cream maker, it didn't freeze up because the volume of the mixture was too much and it ended up overflowing. Mistake number two.

I scooped the mixture into icy pole molds instead and just froze whatever was left in a container. When I came back to the container of taro ice cream however, it was the perfect ice cream consistency. The bad thing is that the icy poles probably won't work out since the mixture doesn't harden completely; but we'll see tomorrow. 

Anyways, even though the means to get to the end was a total mess, the taro ice cream that I got after all of the trouble was so yummy! It was creamy and had that beautifully rich sweet taro taste. I think this is my favourite ice cream recipe so far. Watch this space because I want to try and conquer red bean ice cream next. 

If you want to try to make vegan taro ice cream, I suggest you don't do what I did, but instead use this recipe here. Enjoy!

Next time I'll use food colouring to give it more of a lovely purple colour.

Ice cream sammiches!

Towards the end of 2012 I bought an amazing cookbook called Veganomnicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook. Just in case you didn't know, I've been vegan for over a year and a half. I did it for health reasons and I've felt so great after making the lifestyle change that I don't intend on reverting back anytime soon. Seeing as i'll have so much free time this year, I'm determined to cook as many recipes from the cookbook as I can.

Today I use my ice-cream maker for the first time and made vegan vanilla ice cream and then went one better and made double choc chip cookies from the cookbook to make an ice cream sandwich. Oh man, it's been so long since I've had anything even close to ice cream. That ice-cream maker is now my best friend.