Archive of ‘snacks’ category

20
Jun
2017

Cherry Nice Cream with Creamy Chia-Coconut Pudding

Soon it’s already July, and time for summer holiday! Even thought I’m self employed and fairly busy (luckily!) I’m quite big fan of taking it easy once in a while – for example on holidays. I’ve been planning taking four weeks off, for travelling and spending time at our summer cottage in the middle of nowhere – can’t almost wait. So, as you can for sure guess, my favorite part of summers are the holidays and time spent with the family and friends. But after that comes of course all the fresh and tasty summer food and ingredients! 🙂

Around summer it’s so easy to find fresh berries sold around every corner here, and I could eat cherries every day (if only I could find organic ones as well…). As lovely cherries are eaten just like they are, I do love them on baking and making as well. This time fresh cherries ended up being part of lovely dairy free nice cream, served with chia-coconut pudding. Yumm..

If you just look at the ingredients, this lovely nice cream / pudding could actually be a breakfast as well – only nice and feel good – ingredients here. So if you have more time on your hands on mornings, this recipe could be a very, very nice brekkie as well. (But not here, as our mornings are everything else than peaceful: after making the breakfast for my little girl I quite often end up having and apple and a carrot or a really quick smoothie myself before rushing her to day care.. No nice cream puddings over here, haha!)

Luckily I do have more time after work (I mean like 15 minutes that this recipe demands, hah, if you only have frozen bananas at hand), so at our place nice cream and puddings are usually served as desserts, and eaten quite regularly – this time with lovely cherries!

Tuulia <3

Cherry Nice Cream with Chia-coconut Pudding (dairy free, gluten free, vegan)

for two

pudding:
4 Tbsp chia seeds
1 dl creamy coconut milk
1 dl oat / coconut yogurt

Nice cream:
2 frozen bananas
handfull or two of fresh cherries

couple of fresh cherries for decoration

1. Prepare the pudding: mix all the ingredients and set aside for 15 minutes of so.

2. When the pudding is ready, spoon it to jars or bowls. Then prepare the nice cream: pit the dates, and add them to blender with frozen bananas. Mix until you have lovely, sweet and pink nice cream.

3. Spoon the nice cream on top of the pudding, decorate and serve instantly.

18
May
2017

Summer’s first nice cream (with raspberry and licorice!)

categories: dessert, snacks, vegan

During last weeks we have finally got some spring vibes and sunny days as well – but it still snowed couple of weeks ago, can you imagine? I know, me neither, but unfortunately we had to experience it a while ago, ha.

Luckily that is over now (hopefully) and we can start enjoying spring for real. At least I started enjoying it with nice creams, that I deeply love but as I’m cold sensitive, I rarely eat nice creams before it gets a but warmer (and here in Finland it seems it can take a while…), so when spring comes the first nice cream feels quite special.

As I’m quite impatient I usually make fast nice creams, with blender, without ice cream maker (that I don’t even actually even own). I always keep frozen bananas in my freezer, and as a berry lover, I have tons of self picked berries still from last summer as well. Our whole family loves these kind of ice creams, and to be honest, my daughter has never even tasted anything else, and there’s no need for it either!

Nice creams came to Finland couple of years ago, when my friend (and namesake) Tuulia and Virpi published their super popular Nice Cream book. After this book the blenders around the world has been mixing nice creams after nice creams, since their book was published in six countries all together. I know – wow. If you don’t know the book yet, you should totally check it out!

But now, let’s continue to this easy, fast and super soft nice cream recipe! There are only a few ingredients, and it’s super delicious – it’s a promise!

Wishing you lovely nice cream moments and spring vibes ♥

Charming Raspberry and Licorice Nice Cream

2 big, frozen (ripe) bananas
2-3 Tbsp coconut cream or plant based yogurt
Handful of two of frozen raspberries
0,5 – 2 Tbsp strong raw licorice powder (licorice powder is stronger than licorice root powder)

1. Put bananas and coconut cream / plant based yogurt into a blender. Mix until smooth and fluffy.
2. Divide the nice cream base into two, and take half of it to bowl. Mix raspberries with other helf in the blender. Mix until smooth, pink and sweet.
3. Mix the licorice powder with the other half – put as much as you want!
4. Serve right away, decorate with frozen / fresh berries and enjoy!

11
Apr
2017

Princess Chocolate (a.k.a raw white chocolate with mulberries)

categories: dessert, snacks, vegan

My blog is up and running again, after a few days of problems, wohoo! I tried to come and share this lovely recipe with you guys already on Sunday, only to find out that I couldn’t. I had to hold my horses – what a great practice it was for the impatient me!

But now, finally, may I introduce Princess chocolate! Princess chocolate is vegan and raw white chocolate, accompanied by sweet mulberries and lovely beetroot juice powder – lovely and such a pretty combination! We live next to a flower wholesaler (yep, lucky me!) and I had bought some (ok, a lot of) white and light pink flowers to cheer things up, and princess chocolate was just a perfect match with them – don’t you think?

When I was younger, I used to love white chocolate. I didn’t start to appreciate chocolate (I mean the regular, made on cocoa) until later, and even later I discovered raw chocolate. White chocolate was my favorite, as it was supersweet and milky, thanks to all the sugar and milk powder it contains.

This princess chocolate originates from white chocolate, but at the same time is totally different: the sweetness is milder, it’s more nutritious and has no milk powder so is totally vegan as well – a lot nicer combination as compared to the traditional white chocolate, right? The chocolate wouldn’t be princess chocolate if it wasn’t pretty and luxurious too: the beetroot juice powder brings a bit of sparkle on top! ✨

Gentle and sweet princess chocolate moments,
tuulia

Princess chocolate a.k.a white chocolate with mulberries and beetroot juice powder

about 150 g (3 dl) grated cocoa butter
6 Tbsp sunflower seeds
4 Tbsp mulberries
2 Tbsp rice flour (or other white flour)
about 5 Tbsp maple syrup
about 0,5 tsp vanilla powder
hint of salt

on top: beetroot juice powder + mulberries

1. Place the mulberries and seeds into a powerful blender with the vanilla and salt. Mix until smooth and flour-like. Add the rice flour.

2. Melt the cocoa butter on mild heat.

3. Put the flour mixture into a bowl, and add the melted cocoa butter and maple syrup. Check the taste – at this point the liquid should be quite sweet.

4. Put a parchment sheet into a small tray. Sprinkle mulberries and beetroot juice powder on top, and put into a freezer for a moment.

5. When the white chocolate is ready, finish it up with mulberries, beetroot juice powder, and cut into pieces. Enjoy! ✨

06
Mar
2017

Sunny Sweet Potato Mango Porridge (GF, V)

categories: Breakfast, porridge, snacks, vegan

Winter is still going strong here in the North, and we just had a few really, really grey weeks. A couple of days ago I was at a playground with my daughter, and I saw a glimpse of the sun behind a cloud. I got excited (ha) and started to point it to her. She was staring at the cloud and then back at me, clearly trying to figure out what was happening, and yep, let’s face it, maybe it wasn’t so easy to understand what I meant. Anyway, the glimpse of sun made me realise how badly I do miss the spring and summer time. Oh pretty please, spring, come already!

But as we still have some time before spring really hits these latitudes, I felt I had to come up with something sunny. And here it is! Lovely (and gluten-free of course) mango- sweet potato porridge, topped with oh-so-delicious cardamom granola and berries.

The weekend was actually really pretty here as well (had a lovely walk on ice), and it’s still sunny (but cold, brrr) as we speak. I just prepared more of this porridge, and I have to tell you: when enjoying this yellow and delicious porridge and the sun is shining outside it’s really easy to believe that spring is really just around the corner!

The mango sweet potato porridge is of course gluten-free, dairy-free and suitable for vegans as well. It’s nutritious, filling and very easy to prepare, too!

I hope you’ll love it!

Tuulia xx

Gluten-free and vegan Mango-Sweet Potato Porridge

for two

Porridge:
2 dl buckwheat flakes
1 dl plant based milk + 1 dl water OR 2 dl water
1 Tbsp ghee / virgin coconut oil
about 300 g mango (fresh or frozen)
about 200 g piece of sweet potato
hint of salt

1. Peel the sweet potato and dice it. Boil until soft.
2. Add buckwheat flakes and liquids into a kettle, and season with salt and cardamom. Let boil with low heat until cooked.
3. Peel mango and dice it too. Add the mango and cooked sweet potato to the porridge, and mix with a hand blender, until smooth and nice. If you use frozen mango, the porridge will of course be cold. If you don’t like that, no worries – just put the kettle back on the stove and heat the porridge.
4. Serve the porridge with granola and berries.

granola:
2 dl buckwheat / gluten free oat flakes
1 dl sunflower seeds
1 dl pumpkin seeds
4 Tbsp ghee / virgin coconut oil
1,5 tsp cardamom
2 Tbsp lucuma powder
4 medium sized dried figs
(2 Tbsp maple syrup, if desired)

There will be a lot of granola left, and it’s perfect with other porridges, oatgurts and so on. Store it in a glass jar.

1. Heat the oven to 175 degrees.
2. Mix all the ingredients together and spread onto an oven tray.
3. Heat for about 15 minutes, until the granola is golden brown and lovely.

Previous 1 2 3 4 … 8 Next