White Chocolate Biscoff Cookies

When I first posted these on my instagram, everyone loved them! I promised that I would write up the recipe –  so here it is!

These cookies are white chocolate chip – but with a hidden surprise…

They’re stuffed with a biscoff spread filling!

The cookies themselves are pretty big, so make sure when you bake them you leave plenty of space on the tray for them – else you end up with several cookies stuck together.

• Servings: 12 cookies
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Ingredients

For the cookies
• 100g vegan white chocolate chips (or chop up a white chocolate bar into chunks)
• 140g vegan butter
• 150g brown sugar
• 100g white sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tbsp oil
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 2 tbsp water
• 0.5 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 275g plain flour

For the filling

• 125g biscuit spread
• 40g icing sugar (powdered sugar)

Directions

Preheat the oven to 175C/350F
1. Begin by combining the butter, sugars, and vanilla in a bowl and mixing unitil smooth and creamy.
2. Add the oil, baking powder, and water, and stir until combined.
3. Mix in the bicarbonate of soda.
4. Stir through the flour until a firm dough forms. Mix in the chocolate chips.
5. In a separate bowl, mix together the biscuit spread and icing sugar until the mixture is able to be formed into balls with your hand.
6. Form the cookie dough into twelve large cookie sized balls (or more/less if you would rather) and set them aside.
7. Take one of the cookie dough balls, break it in half, and flatten each half slightly.
8. Add a teaspoon sized amount of the biscoff mixture in the middle of one of the halves, and cover with the other half – making sure to seal well. Don’t worry about flattening the dough, it’ll do that in the oven.
9. Repeat until all the cookie dough is used up.
10. Place on a lined baking tray, and bake in the oven for 12-15 minutes until golden.
11. Enjoy!

Marshmallow Fluff Brownies – VeganMoFo Day 22

So, today’s VeganMoFo is about Fancy, but Frugal. I don’t actually do a whole ton of “fancy” food – you know, haute cuisine, giant plates with teeny portions of food, exotic ingredients – most of my savoury food is firmly in the home cooking, comfort food genre. If you want something fancy from me, it’s going to be a dessert. And so, I made brownies.

This may be my fourth brownie recipe on this blog, but it’s SO worth it. It uses pretty much the base recipe from my fudgy brownies, but it’s topped with marshmallow! Vegan marshmallows are, as you probably know, a bit expensive, but this isn’t! It’s made using aquafaba, which you use in the brownies anyway, and you probably have leftover from chickpeas.

The brownies end up topped with a fluffy, gooey, sweet cloud of marshmallow fluff that’s toasted lightly under the grill (or, broiler to some – apparently they’re the same thing) to give it a caramelised top. When I say lightly, I mean it – sugar caramelises very quickly so you have to keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t burn, burnt sugar is nasty.

The marshmallow fluff is based on what I used for these hot chocolate cupcakes, though you make less fluff (the perfect amount to cover the brownies!). It has xanthan gum in, which is necessary as it gives the fluff that gooey, slightly stretchy texture that marshmallow fluff has, but also more importantly stops the fluff from losing its shape – if you don’t put it in, it’ll look fine for a little, but disintegrate very shortly, which is very sad. You only need a small amount of xanthan gum, and it lasts forever, so it’s a good investment, and it means you can always whip up fluff when you like! (it goes great on hot chocolate).

Marshmallow Fluff Brownies

• Servings: 25 brownies
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Ingredients

For the Brownies
• 115g vegan dark chocolate, broken in to pieces
• 50g cocoa powder
• 90g vegan butter
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 4 tbsp aquafaba
• 360g white sugar
• 50ml milk of choice
• 300g plain flour
• 100g chocolate chips
For the Fluff
• 100ml aquafaba
• 1/4 tsp cream of tartar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 200g icing sugar
• 1/2 tsp xanthan gum

Directions

Preheat the oven to 175C/350F
1. Begin by placing the chocolate, cocoa powder, and butter in a heat proof bowl and melting (I do this in the microwave, but a double boiler is fine too!).
2. Once melted, add the vanilla, salt, bicarb, baking powder, aquafaba, and milk, and stir until combined.
3. Whisk in the sugar well.
4. Fold through the flour and chocolate chips.
5. Press the brownie mixture into a lined tin – it’ll be quite thick, but that’s a good thing!
6. Bake in the preheated oven for 30-35 minutes, until a knife inserted comes out clean.
7. Leave the brownies to cool completely before making the topping.
8. To make the topping, begin by placing the aquafaba in a very clean bowl (important – if it’s at all greasy it won’t whip!).
9. Set aside 50g of the icing sugar, and add the xanthan gum to it, and mix well.
10. To the aquafaba, add the vanilla extract and cream of tartar.
11. Whisk the aquafaba with an electric mixer until it forms stiff peaks – up to ten minutes.
12. Now, with the mixer running, add the plain icing sugar a spoonful at a time, allowing it to combine.
13. Once the plain icing sugar is added, add the xanthan gum mixture a spoonful at a time, with the mixer still running.
14. Once thoroughly combined, your fluff is done! Spread it evenly over your brownies.
15. Preheat your grill (or broiler).
16. Place the fluff topped brownies under the grill, and grill until turning brown on top (watch carefully, as they can turn very quickly!).
17. Leave to cool, and then slice into individual brownies.

Chocolate Chip Banana Bread – VeganMoFo Day 17

Carrying on with the budget theme for VeganMoFo, today we’re all about “Super Cheap Sweets”. Now, anyone who knows me will know I never skip the sweet food (OK, I’d eat sweet over savoury if I had to pick) but if you’re buying fancy vegan cakes and chocolates, it can get more expensive. Thankfully, it’s easy to make cheap and tasty sweets by yourself, like this banana bread!

Bananas are a great fruit to bake with cheaply, because the older they get, the better they are for baking – and the cheaper they are! To make banana bread, you want bananas with plenty of brown spots, and I often find these discounted in supermarkets. Using bananas, you don’t need anything like eggs in baking, which makes it even cheaper (and of course vegan).

Chocolate chips added to banana bread make it even tastier, but you could sub them out for any add ins you like – walnuts are nice, or dried fruit if you like it! Just check your chocolate chips for milk ingredients before you use them.

Chocolate Chip Banana Bread

• Servings: 1 loaf
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Ingredients

• 4 medium bananas, mashed
• 225g plain flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• large pinch salt
• 110g sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 75ml sunflower oil
• 100g chocolate chips

Directions

Preheat the oven to 170C/340F
1. Begin by mixing the mashed bananas, sugar, salt, oil, and vanilla extract in a large bowl.
2. Stir in the flour and baking powder to form a smooth batter.
3. Add the chocolate chips and mix.
4. Pour into a lined loaf tin.
5. Bake in the preheated oven for 50-60 minutes, until a knife inserted in the middle comes out clean.
6. Leave to cool in the tin (or eat warm!).

Low FODMAP chocolate biscuits – VeganMoFo Day 15

Have you ever heard of the low-FODMAP diet? It’s an elimination diet mostly aimed at IBS sufferers, but can also be used for other chronic conditions. FODMAPs (Fermentable Oligo-saccharides Di-saccharides Mono-saccharides and Polyols) are carbohydrates that have been found to contribute to irritation in the gut in some people – basically, they’re things that people with IBS are often intolerant to. The low-FODMAP diet gets you to eliminate all FODMAPs for a certain period of time, and then slowly reintroduce them, one at a time, so you can figure out what your body can handle. It is a really boring elimination diet – I’ve been on it myself and it wasn’t fun! Here is a list of high, and low FODMAP foods. For today’s VeganMoFo, I made chocolate biscuits that are acceptable on a low FODMAP diet!

These biscuits are made with oats, rather than wheat flour, as wheat is a high fodmap food. If you use certified gluten free oats and baking powder, these biscuits are also gluten free. I used vitalite vegan butter for these, which I believe is low Fodmap, but around the world vegan butters may vary!

Low FODMAP Chocolate Biscuits

• Servings: 12
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Ingredients

• 250g oats
• 100g vegan butter (i used vitalite), melted
• 60g golden syrup
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 100g white sugar
• 30g cocoa powder
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Directions

1. Begin by pulsing the oats in a food processor until they are finely milled and flour-like.
2. Meanwhile, mix the melted butter, golden syrup, vanilla extract, and sugar together in a large bowl until well combined.
3. Stir through the oat flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, and bicarbonate of soda.
4. Place in the fridge for half an hour at least (you can make the dough a day in advance if you prefer).
Preheat the oven to 180C/355F
5. Take the dough out of the fridge and form into walnut size balls. Place on a lined baking tray and flatten slightly.
6. Bake in the preheated oven for 10-12 minutes, until they’re a little browner.
7. Leave to cool on the baking tray.

 

Marshmallow Tiffin – VeganMoFo Day 3

Day 3 of VeganMoFo 2018! It’s another sweet recipe coming your way today. The prompt for today’s MoFo post is “Inspired by a leader of a place, country, or group”. I tried to think of leaders with food associations and I ended up thinking royal – specifically Prince William, seven years ago, getting married. A royal wedding cake you’d think would be fruit cake – pretty traditional, right? But for his wedding, the prince requested a tier of his favourite tiffin! Being a prince and all he was able to get McVities to make it for him, enough to serve 600, but I decided to create a vegan version which instead makes about thirty servings.

Tiffin – in this case, referring to a dessert and not an Indian meal – is an unbaked cake make from crushed biscuits and chocolate at its most basic. In many cases, it also has raisins or other dried fruit, but those are controversial ingredients as many people don’t like them, so I replaced them with marshmallows. I used the mini Freedom Mallows but you can use whatever vegan marshmallows you have, if they’re big just chop them into smaller pieces. Many people use digestive biscuits for tiffin, but like Prince William himself I prefer using rich tea biscuits as, contrary to their name, they’re not as rich and carry the chocolate well! If you can’t get rich tea biscuits you will want to use a plain crunchy biscuit.

I used white chocolate as well as plain chocolate here – just in the topping, marbled, but if you can’t get vegan white chocolate, plain chocolate works just as well!

Vegan Marshmallow Tiffin

• Servings: 30 small tiffin bars
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Ingredients

• 300g vegan dark chocolate
• 3 tbsp golden syrup (or sub for maple/agave/vegan syrup of choice)
• 75g vegan butter (I used vitalite)
• 250g rich tea biscuits, broken up (pulse them in a food processor until mostly chopped)
• 50g mini marshmallows
To top
• 100g dark chocolate
• 100g vegan white chocolate

Directions

1. Prepare and line a baking dish with non-stick paper.
2. In a large bowl, melt together the dark chocolate, golden syrup, and vegan butter. Either do this in the microwave or in a double boiler on the stove.
3. Into the melted mixture, add the biscuits and marshmallows, and stir until fully coated.
4. Press all of this into your lined baking dish, try to make it even!
5. In two separate bowls, melt the remaining dark chocolate and the white chocolate. Place blobs of each on top of the tiffin mix, and use the back of a spoon to swirl them around to create a marbled effect.
6. Place in the fridge for 2+ hours until fully set, and then cut with a sharp knife.