These vegan cashew blondies cut out the middleman and use pure cocoa butter for a natural white chocolate flavour without the white chocolate.
A hefty dose of vanilla extract and salted cashews complement the cocoa butter flavour, and golden syrup and aquafaba help to create a texture somewhere between a cake and a fudgy biscuit.
Cocoa butter has a similar fat content to coconut oil but sets much harder at room temperature. Using it for the first time can feel scarily like you’re adding molten wax to your baking. The aroma is unmistakeable, however, and reminds you that cocoa butter is one of the key ingredients in chocolate. It can make up around 20% of white, milk and dark chocolate alike. White chocolate generally contains a minimum of 20% cocoa butter.
I find that a little goes a long way, thankfully. This recipe uses 80g of cocoa butter and no other added fat to make a 10″ square tray, so 16 decent-sized blondies each contain around 5g of cocoa butter.
Cashew Blondies…
Ingredients
- 170 g roasted salted cashews
- 180 g self-raising flour
- 140 g golden caster or light brown sugar
- 80 g cocoa butter
- 50 ml golden syrup
- 1.5 tbsp vanilla extract
- 50 ml aquafaba (chickpea water, see below)
- 1/8 tsp cream of tartar
Method
- Set the oven to 180°C/360°F and lightly oil or line a suitable square or rectangular tin (the pictured blondies were baked in a 10″ square tin).
- Roughly grind or chop the cashews so that they are a mixture of finer and larger pieces. Set aside 30 g and place the rest in a large bowl.
- Add the flour to the nuts and stir through.
- Melt the cocoa butter and golden syrup (microwaving is easiest).
- For the aquafaba, simply turn a can of chickpeas up and down a few times before opening and straining the liquid into a jug or bowl. An ordinary can will probably have twice the amount of liquid you need for this recipe. Measure 50 ml, add the cream of tartar, and beat with an electric whisk as you would to make meringue, until at least soft peak stage. Gradually add the sugar and continue beating until you have a glossy soft ‘meringue’ mixture.
- Stir the vanilla into the cocoa butter mixture and then pour this into the dry ingredients. Stir lightly before folding in the aquafaba. (Incidentally, this raw mixture tastes amazing and not unlike the fondant centre of a creme egg.)
- Transfer to the tin, sprinkle over the reserved cashew nuts and bake for around 25 minutes until it has puffed up and settled back down with a crinkly top, brownie-style.
- Allow to cool completely before cutting into squares.
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