Last week, my boss pitched an idea to our temporary admin and me: a pulse-themed lunch. One person would bring a starter; another, a main; and the last, a dessert. Our temp - who is apparently French-Canadian - offered to bring a home-made split pea soup. My boss had some salad ideas. That left the dessert to me. At first, I thought I might try something with pea flour in it. Cookies, perhaps. But then I remembered that one of our very own Alberta pulse processors, Mountain Meadows Food Processing, sells a product that is made of peas but tastes quite a bit like peanut butter.
That's right. Peabutter.
My first experiment with it, however, did not turn out well.
I found a recipe for flourless gluten-free peanut butter cookies. My bright idea was to sub out the peanut butter for peabutter and the 3/4 cup of sugar for around 1/4 cup of stevia. The cookies baked okay and even tasted okay - once I could get them down. They were awfully cloying. Or, as my boss put it when I described it to her the next day, "Mwack mwack mwack." Or, as Ryan described it after his first bite and a big glass of milk, "You've found a new type of concrete!"
They really did have a good flavour, and once I topped them with a dollop of raspberry jam, they only got a little stuck in my throat on the way down. But the next day, I went to see how the leftovers held up, and they literally CRUMBLED in my hand.
Experiment 1 = Abject failure
So I came up with another idea and then scoured the internet to see if it was even a thing. Indeed, peanut butter mousse is not something I just made up in my head, and thankfully, I found quite a nice recipe for it.
I subbed the peanut butter for peabutter, the sugar for stevia, and whipped coconut cream for heavy cream. And I must say it's rather tasty. And fluffy. And easy.
Unfortunately, I was less happy with the way the chococado whipped cream turned out. Really, I only made it because I had been raving at work about my chococado pudding, and my office mates didn't believe avocados belonged with chocolate. So when I saw the recipe for Chocolate Avocado Icing (which suggested that the icing could be combined with coconut whipped cream to make chocolate whipped cream) in my new Simply Sugar and Gluten Free cookbook, I had to try it.
The recipe in the book called for making it in a food processor, though, and I only have a blender. Now I know that a blender is simply no substitute for a food processor: the icing came out chunky. Green chunks are not something you want to see in chocolate icing. I managed to get it smoothed out, but even my coconut milk wouldn't cooperate into making adequate whipped coconut cream. For the mousse, I used a can of coconut cream, and it whipped quite well. For the CCWC, I used coconut milk, and it just didn't work as well. Won't be doing that again.
To top it all off, the icing - now whipped cream - has a bit of a weird flavour and isn't as chocolately as I would like. It will do in a pinch, but I may pick up a can of artificial chocolate whipped cream to serve at the office tomorrow. That's a thing, right?
Peabutter Mousse
7 tbsp cream cheese (I used light)
1/2 cup peabutter
1/8 cup stevia
1 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 cup whipped coconut cream (see recipe below)
With a mixer, beat together cream cheese, peabutter, and stevia until a uniform colour, then add the vanilla. Beat in 1/4 cup of the whipped coconut cream until just blended. Using a large spatula, fold in the remaining whipped coconut cream until the mixture is well blended but still fluffy.
Whipped Coconut Cream
1 15oz can full-fat coconut cream
8 drops liquid stevia (add more if you like it to be sweeter)
1/2 tsp vanilla
Refrigerate the cream overnight. DO NOT SHAKE THE CAN. Carefully remove the lid and scrape the thick layer of cream into a medium sized bowl, being careful not to get any of the clear liquid under it. With a hand mixer whisk attachment, beat the cream until soft peaks form, about four minutes. Mix in the stevia and vanilla and refrigerate until use.
Chococado Whipped Coconut Cream
If I had to do it all over again, I would mix one Chococado Pudding recipe (minus the cinnamon and cayenne) with one Coconut Whipped Cream recipe. I bet that would work. Maybe.
No comments:
Post a Comment