Tahini Eggplant

This is not a very sweet recipe, but I enjoy it very much for how satiating it is, and its ability to be eaten hot or cold and still taste alright.  The proportions here will yield two to three large servings.  Sometimes, I top this with balsamic vinegar, or sunflower seeds.

Ingredients

♕1 large eggplant
♕At least 0.5 lb / 0.25 kg spinach
♕6 T / 180g tahini
♕1/4 cup / 20g raisins
♕1/2 cup / 50g walnuts
♕Grapeseed oil, for cooking

Procedure

♕Heat up a frying pan to medium heat, with oil
♕Dice the eggplant into 1' by 1' / 2cm by 2cm cubes.
♕Cook eggplant until browned and mostly translucent, about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
♕Reduce heat to medium-low and stir in the spinach.
♕When the leaves are almost entirely wilted, take the frying pan off of the heat and stir in walnuts and raisins.
♕Stir in the tahini.
♕Serve.  

Orange and Walnut Shortbread Cookies

Shortbread cookies are rather simple to make.  This recipe has a subtle nutty aroma, and the sort of orange you select for zesting strongly influences the final result's smell.  If you have no turbinado sugar, you can easily substitute white sugar, but I also recommend adding a couple pinches of shaved dark chocolate to the batter.

Ingredients:

♕1/2 cup / 120g butter, unsalted, at room temperature.
♕190g / 1.5 cup white flour
♕1/4 cup / 55g turbinado sugar
♕10 walnut halves, ground
note: you want the largest pieces no larger than 3mm
♕zest of one small, aromatic orange
♕1 t / 3mL vanilla extract
♕Approximately 30 walnut halves
note: or more, depending on how thin and small you cut your cookies

Procedure:

♕Combine butter, zest, and sugar.
♕Mix in chopped walnuts flour, and vanilla and combine until dough is homogeneous.
♕Roll the dough into a tubelike shape and refrigerate for at least 20 minutes.
♕Preheat oven to 375˚F / 190˚C.
♕Cut the dough into thin cookie slices.
♕Top each cookie with a walnut half.
♕Bake for 20 minutes, rotating the sheet halfway if you have poor convection.
♕Allow to cool, and serve.

Chocolatey Banana Bread

Banana bread is a very convenient way to use up blackened bananas.  This recipe for banana bread contains a high amount of whole grains, with chocolatey undertones and chopped nuts for complexity.  It is a good bread for breakfast, with a dough that is not too moist or too dense, thanks to the combined efforts of the baking soda and sour cream.

Ingredients:

♕1 cup / 120g whole wheat flour
♕.5 cup / 50g rye flour
♕.5 cup / 65g white flour
♕2 t / 9g baking soda
♕2 T / 11g cacao powder
♕3 T / 25g dark chocolate, chopped and/or shaved
♕1 cup / 200g turbinado sugar
♕.75 cup / 180mL milk
♕1 tsp / 5mL vanilla extract
♕.25 cup / 55g coconut oil
♕3 very ripe bananas
♕2 eggs
♕4T / 58g sour cream
♕10 hazelnuts

Procedure:

♕Preheat oven to 375˚F /
♕Sift together flours, cacao powder, shaved chocolate, and baking soda.  Add sugar and stir.
♕Mash bananas into a paste in a separate bowl.
♕Melt coconut oil and stir into bananas.
♕To banana mixture, incorporate milk, vanilla extract, eggs, and sour cream.  Stir until
homogeneous.
♕Chop hazelnuts roughly.
note: a mortar and pestle is ideal for this.  Shoot for chunks the size of pebbles.
♕Once the oven is ready, quickly divide mixture into two standard (8' by 3' / 21cm by 8cm) pans.
♕Top with hazelnuts, and bake for 45 minutes.

Healthy Chocolate Covered Fruit

In Russia, it is rather common to serve tea with small candies.  A popular sort of small candy is chocolate-covered dried fruit, stuffed with a nut.  This recipe recreates these candies, but while it is very tasty, it is also very ugly.  Do not let the appearance discourage you!
This procedure can be used as a guide for lots of different fruit and nut combinations.  My very favorite is prunes with toasted almonds.
The chocolate sauce can of course be substituted with simple melted chocolate.  The charm of the coconut-oil based coating is that it smells very strongly of coconut, and you control the amount and type of sugar as well as cacao powder.  If you do choose to use melted chocolate instead, know that the layer of chocolate on each fruit will be much thicker.
In such a simple recipe, quality must be high.  Use good chocolate, aromatic coconut oil, soft dry fruit, and toasted nuts for candies worth serving with tea.

Ingredients:

♕18 dried apricots, whole
♕18 walnut halves
♕3T / 50g extra virgin coconut oil
♕3T / 25g cacao powder
♕2T / 25g sugar

Procedure:

♕Melt the oil and sugar.  Stir in the cacao powder, making sure to avoid clumps.
♕In each apricot, make a long slice, so that the apricot becomes a pocket.
♕Place one nut in each apricot.
♕Dip apricots in to the chocolate mixture, and place on a piece of parchment paper.
♕Move to a cold place.
♕At this point, the chocolate coating will be rather thin on the fruit.  If you wish to make it thicker, allow coating to dry and quickly redip the candies.
♕Allow the coating to harden completely, and serve.

Sort-of-Healthy Donut Truffles

This recipe is inspired by all those truffle recipes floating around.  It is high in "good" fat and has some plant protein in it, and it tastes nice, too!  The coating of turbandino sugar has them reflect light in a very pretty way.

The truffles were meant to taste like traditional American donuts, and I think they do that pretty well.  Their texture, however, is much more dense than fried dough.

Ingredients:
♕ 1 1/2 cups/220g cashews, soaked overnight (pre-soak amount)
♕ 1/2 cup/75g almonds, whole 
♕ 1/2 cup/85g golden raisins
♕ 3 T/50mL coconut oil, melted
♕ dash nutmeg
♕ 1 t/5mL quality vanilla extract
♕ pinch salt
♕ approximately 1/3 cup/60g turbandino sugar, powdered sugar, or ground almonds
note: if using ground almonds, also add 1/2 t almond extract to this recipe.  The turbandino sugar adds a crunch to an otherwise soft sweet, while powdered doesn't interfere with texture. 

Procedure:

♕ In a food processor, grind the almonds into a very fine powder.  
♕ Dump the raisins in, grind, and then add all other ingredients save for the turbandino sugar or powdered sugar.
♕ Process until the whole mess looks homogenous. 
♕ Dump the mixture into a bowl, and pinch off pieces roughly the size of a ping pong ball.
♕ Roll the pieces into sphered, and coat in the sugar or ground almonds
note: instead of rolling in sugar, you could also make a donut-like glaze from the powdered sugar and a few drops of an extract of choice, and cover the spheres in that.
♕ Place on a plate and refrigerate or freeze until serving.

Raw, Vegan Berry Cheesecake

This post is about a recipe by the blogger, Fragrant Vanilla Cake.  I found her recipe for a raw vegan cheesecake and couldn't help but try it.  The results were great!  Very rich, flavorful, and so dense in nutrients.
The cheesecake's "cheese" is actually cashews that were soaked in water and pulverized.  The addition of coconut oil, lavender, lemon, vanilla, and blackberries makes it really darn good.
The only changes that I made to her recipe were:

A) instead of using only agave nectar for sweetness, I used equally raw cane sugar, honey, and agave.  I did this because of doubts about agave's healthiness, but still included the agave since honey has a very strong flavor and sugar is not a liquid.

B) I didn't make the frosting for lack of a young coconut, but if/when I remake this cake, the frosting will definitely be included, it looks so pretty!

I strongly recommend making your own opinion about this cake. The hands-on process is only about half an hour if you're quick and have a good food processor (and not making the frosting), but you need a total of 12 hours to make the cake come to its ready-to-eat glory.