Unicorn Vegan Natural Hot Chocolate Recipe!

I like natural food, natural healthy food, without food colouring. Food that you can see what it's made from, cakes that are easy to make, no icing, or marzipan, or layers of rainbows, or thick dollops of cream, I like my drinks the same, uncomplicated gorgeousness. I am completely against those hot chocolates that other people seem to love, those ones made with powder, topped with spray cream, sprinkled with sweets and stuff. Yuck! It all seems a bit too elaborate and a bit too over the top and it just looks very, very bad for you it seems tacky and unhealthy. So, when the Unicorn food fashion for rainbowed items came along, I thought I'd just hold my breath, continue making my black bean brownies and simple hot chocolates and wait for it to go away. I was pleased to see in one of the Sunday Times magazines their barometer pointed to the Unicorn trend going down! Yippee!

What happened then and why was I inspired to create my Vegan, Unicorn Hot Chocolate?

What happened was the weather! After several sunny days, we woke up to a dull overcast day, with rain on and off through the day. One of the first things that I thought this morning was, 'This is a hot chocolate kind of day'. I am still continuing my plant based diet, since Veganuary and this hot chocolate had to be Vegan, mostly healthy and taste deliciously comforting and it had to be sparkly too. First of all, I created a spirulina based hot chocolate with cashew nut butter and although I enjoyed it and so did my children and even Miranda, of Ido-Vintage, a very cute Vintage shop down the road from us, had one and thought it was delicious and I have to say she was instrumental in inspiring me to experiment with colourful Unicorn stuff in the first place! Today, however some new ingredients came in from a new supplier and now instead of using spirulina to create a mint green colour, I'm using beetroot powder to create the deeply pink topping and edible flowers! So, if you want to make one of these as a treat for yourself at home, here's how you do it!

Mini Unicorn Vegan Hot Chocolate

1/ Into a small cup place the following:

1 teaspoon of melted Cacao Butter
1 teaspoon of Agave Nectar

2/ Mix together well.

3/ Warm and froth up around 100ml of almond milk.

4/ Pour the almond milk into the mug and make sure it is foamy on top.

5/ Top with a little Beetroot Powder and  Golden Chocolate Powder.

6/ Of course, if you want to you can treat yourself to some vegan sprinkles and really go to town but I would prefer to sprinkle some edible flowers on top.

Take lots of pictures and post them everywhere.

Then sit back and enjoy.

Oh and I have to tell you, that my two boys loved this hot chocolate! Absolutely loved it and so do I, which is a first in a long time, for us all to enjoy the same thing! I might not have mentioned that the deep pink stuff on top is beetroot powder!

Nutrition Facts
Servings 1.0
Amount Per Serving
calories 141
% Daily Value *
Total Fat 7 g	11 %
Saturated Fat 3 g	14 %
Monounsaturated Fat 2 g
Polyunsaturated Fat 1 g
Trans Fat 0 g
Cholesterol 0 mg	0 %
Sodium 136 mg	6 %
Potassium 198 mg	6 %
Total Carbohydrate 19 g	6 %
Dietary Fiber 1 g	5 %
Sugars 1 g
Protein 2 g	3 %
Vitamin A	0 %
Vitamin C	0 %
Calcium	26 %
Iron	0 %
* The Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet, so your values may change depending on your calorie needs. The values here may not be 100% accurate because the recipes have not been professionally evaluated nor have they been evaluated by the U.S. FDA.

Chocolate Beetroot Cake with Frosting

I had such a lot of fun on Facebook this week asking for cake flavour suggestions and then I promised that the one I picked as the winning flavour to bake, would have a free slice sent to them through the post! The overall flavour winner was a Lavender and Vanilla cake suggestion, which sounded wonderfully summery and unusual too, so the lucky lady that suggested it, actually did receive a slice of her bespoke, specially created flavour cake through the post, just a few days later and she was delighted. That recipe however, is for another day!

There were so many excellent suggestions that I have decided that I will indeed bake every single one that I feel could be attractive and appealing and made my way. Cakes made my way are wholesome, vegan and glutenfree.

I would make myself bankrupt sending off a free slice of cake to everyone who had made a suggestion, so I have decided to give back in another way, by baking the cake and tweaking it and then sharing my recipe so that anyone can make it!

An important point for me to make is that I don't like faffing around in the kitchen, making things complicated and fussy, I want quick and tasty results. When I work with a recipe, I want it to be easy to read and not have to weight out lots of ingredients first, into lots of bowls and create lots of washing up! No way. I do not like washing up and cleaning up, so space used is minimal and ingredients are measured out with cups, rather than weighed out on scales, a lot easier. This is why my recipes don't have an ingredient list at the beginning. The way to use my recipes is to read through them once to check you have everything you need, or suitable substitutions. Then follow the step by step instructions.

Chocolate Beetroot Cake with frosting.

The Cake

1/ Preheat the oven to 180°

2/ Line a 9" x 9" brownie tin with greaseproof paper and then grease it with vegetable oil.

3/ Put the following ingredients into a large jug and stir well:
1 cup of Essential Buckwheat Flour
1/2 a cup of Doves Farm Gluten Free Plain Flour
1/2 a cup of sugar
1/2 a cup of Divine Cocoa Powder
1/2 a teaspoon of salt
1 teaspoon of Bicarbonate of Soda
1/2 a smashed up bar, 100g of Divine Dark Baking Chocolate

4/ Put the following ingredients into a blender and blend well:

1/2 a cup of cooked beetroot
1 cup of water
1/3 cup of vegetable oil
1 teaspoon of Vanilla Extract
2 tablespoons of Biona Apple Cider Vinegar with Mother

5/ Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients and stir well.

6/ Pour the batter out into the greased and lined baking tray and pop into the preheated oven for 20 minutes.

7/ Take the cake out of the oven and cover with foil, then bake for another 10 minutes, or until a knife stuck into the centre of the cake comes out clean.

8/ Leave the cake to cool, with the foil taken off.

The Frosting

1/ Combine the following ingredients finely in your blender:

Just ripe peeled and stoned avocados x 2

10 x tablespoons of Agave Nectar 

1/2 a cup of Divine Cocoa Powder.

2/ When the cake is cool smooth the frosting over the top. If you are lucky, there might be some mixture left in the blender which you will have to eat, to make cleaning easier!

3/ Slice this cake into 8 equal slices, or even 16 little cubes and store in the fridge until you are ready to serve.

This cake didn't last for one day, as everybody loved it!

If you have any questions about this recipe, please let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading and I'd love to know how you get on when you make yours.

Chickpea, Tomato and Quinoa Dahl

Lunch for Tuesday 5th May 2015, this gorgeous tasting, Chickpea, Tomato and Quinoa Dahl! Presented in a bowl for £2.70, at the time of writing and presented with a poppadom on the side. I have been told many times that I should charge more but I want to make healthy food accessible for all, I want to inspire people to eat like this at home too! People love my cooking but I am not a naturally great cook, the way I cook is to make it as easy as possible for myself, whatever I make is easy to emulate, I promise. Lots of the ingredients we use in our dishes, I stock on our shelves for you to take home and make it for yourself. These prices too are kept as low as I possibly can.

Since around the beginning of March, we have introduced a Daily Dish of the Day in our Shepton Mallet shop, I kept turning people away for lunch and didn't want to do sandwiches. Then one day a beautiful Vegan couple turned up in my shop, they love playing Bananagram, so I got one in for them and maybe that was when they realised I might be open to gentle persuasion. That lovely couple are now a family of three and have completely convinced me to keep cooking Vegan lunches for Shepton Mallet.

I am NOT a vegan myself but what inspires me to keep cooking these vegan dishes? Well, there are several things, I do enjoy challenges and cooking something Vegan and making it look and smell so tasty that even meat eaters will buy it, try it and come back for me, is pretty exciting for me! Our business is based on sustainability, the vegetarian and vegan way of eating is much better for the earth and we are already committed to our business being 100% suitable for vegetarians, there is just less harm done to our world when animal products are avoided and I have to say that all the Vegans I've met so far seem to look fit, healthy and slender. I don't know if that's because they have to keep saying, 'No, I can't eat that, no, sorry, can't eat that', or whether it could be the discipline they show in saying no to certain products, extends over into their own health and self-control. I can't imagine a Vegan person sitting down and just deciding to stuff their face with raw cane sugar, even if it is entirely suitable for vegans. Vegan eating in general fits in with Paleo style diets, apart from the slabs of protein made out of cows or pigs that Paleo eating encourages us to have on our plate. I also like the idea of conscious, mindful eating, of having standards and sticking to them, it appeals to me. If you are going to eat animals, then at least call them by their proper names and don't suddenly change a pig to bacon and a cow to beef, it's silly and a cover up of the truth.

I like the way that these dishes I am creating are nearly always gluten-free, they are always made from scratch, no pre-made sauces, or additives, certainly not bought in from a manufacturer and passed off as my own! My dishes are always great for Slimming World members because they are usually SYN FREE! I am proud of that. That's why I wrote it in big letters. They are not so synfree though, if I have cooked something with tinned coconut milk in, so always check with me first! They are always dairy free too and packed with protein. I don't eat dairy or gluten myself, I feel so much better for it, healthier, fitter and slimmer, so it's easy for me to make those kinds of lunches for everyone else. The other thing is my partner Gunter is diabetic, so I am very aware that foods of a low to medium GI are better for all of us, not just for diabetic people.

The great thing about these Vegan, Dairy-Free, Gluten-Free, Slimming World friendly lunches, is that they embrace people from all cultures, people who have to follow all kinds of restrictions in their diets, people that want to eat healthily, well, tastily and sensibly! I like it when people connect together and these vegan lunches are doing exactly that! Imagine going somewhere to eat where there is NO menu, there is only one dish on offer and that is Dish of the Day! I love seeing people that don't know each other, sitting down to enjoy the same food and people that do know each other and are coming out as a family or as friends sit down and share the same food, it's very, very special. The whole way of doing this means I don't ever have to throw food away. Why ever did we think it was such a good idea to have so many choices in what we eat in restaurants? This way that I am discovering for myself is leaner, greener, healthier and proving to be very popular!

Here are the ingredients that I used in the Chickpea, Tomato and Quinoa Lunch, so you can check through them. Allergens are in bold.

Onion from the Friday Market
Garlic from the Friday Market
Ginger from My Coffee Stop
Tomatoes from the Friday Market
Tinned Tomatoes from My Coffee Stop
Cumin from Peppers
Coriander from Peppers
Turmeric from Peppers
Chilli flakes from Peppers
Yeast Extract from My Coffee Stop
Spinach Leaves from Aldi
Fresh Coriander Leaves from Aldi
Cashew Nut Butter from My Coffee Stop
Quinoa from My Coffee Stop
Kallo Yeast Free Stock Cube from My Coffee Stop, (Contains Celery)
Chick Peas from My Coffee Stop
Leek from the Friday Market
Celery from the Friday Market.

So come along and taste it for yourself, or make it for yourself!

Fairtrade Buzz Cake!

It's the second Tuesday of Fairtrade Fortnight and I'm having real fun challenging myself with seeing how many Fairtrade ingredients I can cram into one cake and still make it delicious and nutritious.

First I started with a Intensely Spicy Chocolate cake, that had 10 Fairtrade ingredients in it. Before I'd even finished mixing it, a customer decided she wanted to buy the whole cake, for a 50th Birthday.

It was a bit of a risk because I'd never made a cake with all those ingredients in together and it would be interesting if they tasted good together. I needn't have worried, a swift text told me, "We all love your cake! Very fabulous. All the tastes work together. Wonderful! Thank you. x".

My next challenge was to make a cake with 15 Fairtrade ingredients, this turned out to be a beautiful breakfast cake, we called it, Choc and Nut Buzz. It sold really quickly and even got an order on Twitter to put two pieces on the side!

My confidence grew, so my next step to take a step, for Fairtrade, was to make a cake with 20 Fairtrade ingredients in!

This cake is not for sale in our shop but is going to be donated to, The People's Supermarket, they are organising a bake-off, where the challenge is to create a tasty cake with as many Fairtrade ingredients in, as you can. Read more about that, here.

That cake has just come out of the oven and we're just waiting for it to cool down, for a dusting of Fairtrade icing sugar!

Why did I want to tell you all about this? Well it sometimes amazes me that when you decide that you're going to use your business to campaign for what you believe in, it's really enjoyable and second of all, I find that passion also translates into business success.

The positive energy that has been created by challenging myself and joining forces with many different people on Twitter, such as @TPSLondon, @AnnuMayor and @FairtradeSleuth is contagious. I hope you too, are infected with our enthusiasm.

What Fairtrade Ingredients did I use?

@FairtradeSleuth particularly wanted to know what ingredients I used in the Fairtrade Buzz cake!

Fairtrade Ingredients Used:
1/ Black Pepper Corn
2/Vanilla Pod
3/Mixed Spice
4/Ground Cinnamon
5/Honey
6/Molasses
7/Raisins
8/Orange Juice
9/Cloves
10/Icing Sugar
11/ Green Tea and Lemon
12/ Raw Cane Caster Sugar
13/Dark Brown Sugar
14/Divine Cocoa
15/Lemon
16/Orange
17/Banana
18/White Spicy Tea
19/Apricot Kernels
20/ Divine Chocolate


All I have to say now is, go bake a cake and see how many Fairtrade ingredients you can cram in.
Enjoy Fairtrade Fortnight 2012!