Apple sauce is one of those things, much like peanut butter, that doesn’t seem to have entered into the British repetoire of foods until recently. Even still I face raised eyebrows and averted eyes when I mention my love of apple sauce. “You… you eat it plain?” they say, like it’s a crime. Yes, yes, yes, and so should you! I figured with traditional Pimm’s, probably the nation’s second drink (next to tea, naturally), maybe someone would give it a go. This is an easy recipe, perfect for a warm summer’s evening, an easy vegan applesauce with strawberries and spices.

Recipe Notes

A few weeks ago, I picked up some Saigon cinnamon and have since been keen to try it out. It’s the strongest and sweetest cinnamon you can buy, so a little goes a long way. You may have correctly deduced this means to use more cinnamon if you’ve only got the standard variety on hand, but I highly recommend seeking the Vietnamese stuff out.

Popular in the U.K., Pimm’s is a gin-based alcoholic drink with spicy citrus undertones, often consumed with fizzy lemonade mixed with fruits and mint. Here it’s used as the main base in cooking down the apples, and complements the final flavour well. If you don’t have any Pimm’s on hand, try a mix of gin and orange juice, or wholly the latter. You may want to cut down on sugar if you use all juice.

If you want a real treat, layer strawberry apple sauce with vanilla soy yoghurt, topped with ginger cookie crumbs!

But how do you get creaminess without the cream?

You’d be surprised what cashews can do, baby! This isn’t an original concept as many a dairy free souls have discovered the value of nuts as an ice cream base, but I’m all about spreading the love. This is a great vegan ice cream to fool dairy fans, and it’s divine with a dollop of peanut butter on top.

Psst, if you’re curious about the stuff that looks like marshmallow fluff stuff, that’s Bryanna Clark Grogan’s marshie fluff (thanks, Bryanna). Talk about fun to make. Talk about sugar high. Talk about… well, I think vegans could talk about marshmallow fluff quite a lot, come to think of it.

Recipe Notes

Okay, so I’ve got one of those annoying frozen drink blenders and the base is pretty much permanently sealed on. This means there’s always a whole load of liquid I can’t get out, especially if it’s a thick blend like this is. Here’s a tip: reserve 60ml (1/4 cup) of the soy milk and after you’ve poured the ice cream base out, chuck the remaining liquid in and swish around to help get the rest of the mix out.

Oh, and if you’ve got a blender which errs on the side of shite and you hate lumpy bits then you can strain the base to filter out any potential cashew hanger-onners.

Which I am not. I just like egg(less)nog.

And coffee.

Recipe Notes

Depending on the desired consistency of the end result, you can use between 1/4 and 1/3 a cup of water. Obviously the former will produce a thicker syrup and, in my case, so will the latter. This is because I would have spilled all of the extra water down myself.

If you feel the need, you can strain the spices, but I personally like the texture.

Not a coffee fan? Don’t worry; this recipe is good for lots of other things too. Have a few suggestions:

• Pancake syrup
• Hot cocoa enhancer
• Top your favourite ice-cream(less)
• With hot rum (okay I’m making this up, but it does sound good
• Flavour cakes
• An easy gift in a pretty bottle!

Over the years I’ve tried several varieties of vegan ice cream and while not completely unimpressed, I was, well, not that impressed. The first commercial product I tried was perhaps 12 years ago, and it tasted like sugar flavoured straw soaked in rain water drained from the gutter of a halted urban development project which eventually became no more than a bird toilet.

Enter Booja-Booja, an English company known for its production of organic vegan chocolate truffles. On my bulk Bonsoy run one Saturday (have you tried the stuff? It’s to die for), I saw tucked in the freezer of my favourite organic shop a new gem: Pompompous Maple Pecan “Stuff in a Tub.”

I had to try it.

This so-called “stuff” immediately rivalled recipes of my good friends Ben and Jerry in flavour, if not in texture as well. I was gob smacked. How could this be?

“May contain nuts”

The culprit behind my new discovery which brought me so much joy? Cashews. Vegan, organic, delicious ice cream based on cashews.

I never knew I liked cashews so much, and I have since extended their use across many other aspects of my cooking. I tried cashew based ice cream recipes from books and from the interwebs, and with some success made made some ice creams fairly close to that of my beloved Booja-Booja.

But I wanted to experiment with my own methods based on what I already knew about making ice cream, what I’d tried and liked, and concepts about which I’d read somewhere once upon a time. This is my result, and really it’s pretty good.

Will I make it again? Most certainly. Will I likely experiment some more with the ingredients? Definitely. This is a work in progress, only one where the first attempt came out damned good.

Recipe Notes

A lot of people ask why I used vodka in my ice cream recipes as most ice cream doesn’t contain vodka. The only reason I use it, aside of course from hoping to take advantage of those I feed, is because alcohol doesn’t freeze. This is a useful trick for anyone with a home freezer which doesn’t circulate air well. Is your ice cream so solid upon removal from your freezer that you have to leave it to thaw before a spoon can touch it? Easy solution: add some alcohol to the mix.

I used granoVita CremoVita as part of the cream base in this recipe. While I usually like to provide generalised products for ingredients, this one fell into the mix simply because I spotted it on the shelf and had to try it. I’m sure you could use any other soy-based sweet whipping cream alternative.

The sorbet vs sherbet argument came to me when I was preparing this recipe. Sorbet is, or at least should be, vegan by nature. Sherbet, on the other hand, has dairy components (though clearly not as much as ice cream). The texture of sherbet isn’t quite as smooth as that of ice cream and is generally lighter in texture, an apt description of my final result. For that reason it became more of a sherbet than an ice cream in my mind. My recipe is “creamy,” but less rich. It’s good. I think so anyway.

And now on to the good stuff…