Cheesecakes are more native to New York, but they are delicious, and there are lots of simple plant-based recipes across the web. Some recipes are for ‘raw cheesecakes’ that make use of date-sweetened blends of nuts and seeds, others use ready-made biscuits for the crumb case, then fill with either soaked cashews or silken tofu, flavoured with whatever the filling is (fruit, chocolate etc).
This baked coffee vegan cheesecake (Ela Vegan) is a make-ahead dessert that you simply pop in the fridge to chill for several hours. The base is made with ground nuts/seeds, dried fruits, vanilla and coconut milk, then pour in the silken tofu and coconut milk filling, flavoured with coffee, nut butter and maple syrup. The cheesecake is then topped with a ganache (coffee, chocolate and nut butter).
If used, choose vegan butters with no palm oil. Avoid nuts for young children and people with swallowing difficulties. Read up on keeping people & pets safe in the kitchen (many foods including dried fruits, coffee, chocolate, nuts and xylitol sweetener are unsafe around animal friends).
a 6-ingredient vegan lemon cheesecake
This 6-ingredient lemon cheesecake (Ela Vegan) is decorated with fresh strawberries. The granola crust is made with coconut butter, and sweetened with maple syrup.
a no-bake date-sweetened cheesecake
This no-bake cheesecake (Ela Vegan) is very simple to make. Sweetened with dates and made with oats, nuts or seeds, it’s flavoured with vanilla and even makes a good breakfast.
poached pears with ginger orange ‘cheesecake’
This recipe for poached pears with ginger orange cheesecake (Rainbow Plant Life) is one of many vegan cheesecake recipes on the web. Most recipes profiled on the England, Naturally website are simple, but this is a bit more complicated, as it’s destined for festive or special holiday meals.
The crust only needs 4 ingredients including soaked raw cashews and coconut cream (made by chilling cans of coconut milk – Biona make good cans, guaranteed free from monkey-slave harvesting). The ‘cheese’ in this case if vegan cream cheese, which is easy to find these days.
To make the recipe extra special, serve alongside poached pears (try to find juicy organic pears from farm shops, rather than rock-hard frozen ones in supermarkets). For this recipe, the pears are poached in a combo of orange juice, white wine, sugar alongside orange peel, ginger and cinnamon sticks.
