Easy Vegan Desserts | 7 Ingredients or Less!

Hey everyone, it's Caitlin and Lily and welcome to another video and today we are celebrating love. Love of food, that is. But we also might be celebrating love depending how you choose to celebrate Valentine's Day, Galentine's Day, Singles Appreciation Day, or whatever other name exists for it. Basically, February 14th is coming up and regardless of your love life, it's a great opportunity to make some yummy treats. So today I'm going to show you two Galentine's slash Valentine's Day, or Guyentimes? Is there anything for guys? Anyways, appropriate desserts that taste really good, are pretty straightforward and easy to make, and yeah, I mean what more could you want than that? So I know some people like chocolate, some people don't like chocolate, some people like fruity things, some people don't, but I really like chocolate. But I refrained from one of the recipes. So we're going to be making some dark chocolate raspberry truffles. This is a really easy recipe and good for a lot of different holidays. And then we're also going to make some blondies, which are completely sans chocolate. I really wanted to put some chocolate chips in and you totally could if you still like chocolate, but this one is chocolate free for all my chocolate haters. And you could also put some extra fruit in there if you're feeling fruity like raspberries or strawberries and be really seasonal and cute and Valentine's Day appropriate. But yeah, let's just get right into it. Here are the recipes. First up, we're going to make some chocolate raspberry truffles. This recipe is very easy, just take a little bit more time, but you only need three main ingredients to make it. So first up, obviously chocolate. We're going to chop our chocolate. I recommend using a chocolate bar for this recipe instead of chocolate chips. And this is because chocolate chips usually have a lower fat content and have more sugar in them, which is really good for chocolate chips, but it actually, they melt worse. That's really great grammar. Basically chocolate bars melt better. So you want to use those. And our second main ingredient in this recipe is raspberries, but freeze dried raspberries to be exact. And you can find these at Trader Joe's, or you can also purchase them online. Some other grocery stores might have them and really just depends on where you live, but you're going to add your raspberries to a food processor and just process it for about 45 to 60 seconds until it forms a fine powder. I do suggest though, waiting for a few seconds to allow the powder to settle unless you want a sharper burst of raspberry dust to the face. So you know, just a pro tip there. So now we are going to get onto making our truffles, which involves melting our chocolate. You can do this in a microwave, but I prefer to use the double boiler method because it's a lot more consistent. So basically you're just going to add some water to a pot and then cover this pot with a large glass bowl and bring that water below it to a while you add the remaining ingredients, which as you can see here is some coconut milk. This helps make our truffles nice and fluffy and creamy. And then we're going to add in the raspberry powder and whisk everything together until the raspberry powder dissolves. I do want to mention, you can kind of see it here, the raspberry powder will have larger seeds in it. I decided to leap those in because it really doesn't make a huge difference, but if you're super anal about that or something, you could sift them out just using a fine mesh metal strainer. But after the raspberry powder is nicely incorporated, we're going to add our chocolate. And as you can see from the edges of the glass bowl, the water has started to steam. So the coconut milk has warmed up and now the chocolate is going to start to melt. So all you're going to do is continue to stir this and the mixture will become darker and darker. And eventually you want to stop when the chocolate is about 80 to 90% melted and then turn off the heat. And then the rest of the chocolate will just melt from the heat of the other chocolate. So this prevents burning and gives us some luscious truffle material, but obviously it's a little melted. So we're going to put it in the fridge for about two and a half to three hours to thicken up where it will look a little bit like this. Basically you want the chocolate to be firm enough where you can scoop it out and roll it into a ball with your hands. So here I'm using a one tablespoon measure cookie scoop. So all my balls will be nice and even. You could totally use a tablespoon as well. I just think this is a lot easier to deposit into your hands. And here I just run the ball with my fingers, but you also sort of want to roll it in between your hands to form a nice dough, not a dough, a ball. What am I saying? Anyways, you're going to repeat this with the remaining dough until you have all of your chocolate balls. And as you can see here, they are a little rough around the edges, but I just popped them in the fridge for a few minutes and then re-rolled them. And as you can see, they get a little smoother. So if you have a problem with that, that's what you should do. So now we're going to coat our truffles and you have a few options here. You can use any or all of these. I would recommend coating the truffles in something though, because they are pretty soft on themselves and the truffles just give it a nice non-sticky thing to hold while you bite into it. So here I'm using cacao powder. This one gives it a nice deep chocolate flavor and it has a really nice consistency. I think it looks cool when some of the cacao powder sort of dissolves in. If you have extra raspberries, you can blend them up and roll your truffles in raspberry powder. This would be perfect for Valentine's Day because it's nice and pretty and pink. And then here you can also roll the truffles in coconut sugar to give a little bit of the sweeter, crunchy bite. I would only recommend this if you're serving them immediately because that did melt over time and they became kind of sticky. And then last but not least, I just had some coconut milk powder around my fridge and I thought some white truffles would look cool too. So I decided to roll them in that. You could also use powdered sugar if you have some vegan powdered sugar too. But all in all, you can roll any and all of your truffles in whatever way you see fit. I just decided to go with a variety of colors here because I thought it looked nice and festive. This would be really cute if you were serving it at a party. But that's it for this recipe. So pretty simple steps like I said in the beginning and the truffles are luscious and so, so good. So I hope you try this out. Next, we are going to be making some vegan blondies like I said in the beginning of the video for all my non-chocolate enjoyers. I don't know who you are, but you know. Okay, anyways, these blondies are good and I'm not trying to shame you or anything. So we're going to start out by mixing all of our dry ingredients together. I found that the combination of oat flour with another flour worked the best. So here I'm using sorghum flour, but you could also use brown rice flour or a gluten-free flour blend. The full recipe is linked in the description of this video. Next up, we're going to add in some baking powder to give them a little rise and some salt and then we're going to whisk all the dry ingredients together until they're well incorporated. Then once everything's looking nice and even and there aren't any clumps, we're going to move on to mixing our wet ingredients together. Here I am using white raw cane sugar because I wanted these blondies to be as light as possible, but you could also use coconut sugar if you wanted to just know that they're going to be darker. Then we're also adding in some non-dairy milk and some vanilla extract and then we're going to whisk everything together again until the sugar dissolves and then at this point we're going to add in some cashew butter. Again, I wanted to go with the lightest nut butter here, but you could also use almond butter just know it's going to affect the final flavor. Here I'm just breaking off smaller scoops of the nut butter into the batter because I find that it's easier to mix or whisk in with the liquid ingredients or if you're feeling kind of lazy you could totally just use a blender too. Also, the way I said whisk totally sounded like family guy. Let me know in the comments if you know what I'm talking about. Anyways, once all of that is nice and uniformly combined, we're going to form a well in the center of our dry ingredients or not, but I would recommend doing that and then pour it in and just mix everything together with a spatula until you get a nice thick and even batter. It should look a little something like this. So here's the part where you can get a little creative. I wanted to keep these totally white, white chocolate-ish, but vegan white chocolates don't exist so I'm using macadamia nuts. I like to save a few of my nuts to put on top of the blondies. I think it looks better. So I'm just folding probably about two-thirds to three-fourths of them into the batter and then I'm going to transfer this into an 8 by 8 inch lined baking pan and then use a spatula to spread it around. That being said, you totally don't have to use macadamia nuts. If you wanted to keep things white-ish, you could also use chopped cashews. There are some vegan chocolate chips out there, but they're kind of expensive and hard to find so I just didn't even want to bother trying to find them. If you're not opposed to chocolate, I would highly recommend adding regular chocolate chips, but this batter is thick enough as well where you could add fruit like raspberries or strawberries or any combination of any of the things I just mentioned. So after you spread out your batter, you do want it to be as smooth as possible on top because it won't even out too much in the oven. You're going to top it with your remaining toppings and then press those into the batter and then pop this into the oven for about 28 to 30 minutes until the brownies become nice. Oh sorry, blondies, not brownies. Nice and fluffy and golden as you can see here. Some of the macadamia nuts even got a little toasty which adds another element of flavor which I really like. And you want to transfer the parchment paper to a cooling rack and let the blondies cool completely before you slice and serve them. They are nice and fluffy but also still rich enough to qualify as dessert and I really enjoyed them even though I typically am a chocolate girl. So here I decided to serve them with some fresh fruit, but you can really enjoy them as it is on their own or however you like, like adding more chocolate or not. Okay, bye. And that's it guys. Leave a comment below and tell me which recipe you would rather have for Valentine's Day. I think I'd want both because I like the truffles but I also like the blondies or I can make chocolate chip raspberry blondies or I can make blondies and then just put a truffle on top of the blondie and eat it. That one sounds good to me too. Okay, but anyways, that aside, however you're celebrating Valentine's Day, just know that you are loved and you are worthy of love whether you have a significant other in your life or not. And I hope you guys have a good day and as always all the recipes will be linked below as well as a link to my Pinterest page if you want to save them for later. But yeah, I think that's it. Stay awesome, stay cool, eat good food, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Bye!