The David Lebovitz effect

I'm very suggestible. Reading this post on David Lebovitz' blog, along with the fact that I had some chickpea liquid in the fridge to use up, led directly to a completely unnecessary, yet somehow very necessary S'mores Pie.

It got a bit burnt under the grill, but I'm pretending that was intentional.

The crust is the Press-in Almond Crust from Vegan Pie in the Sky with some dark cocoa powder added. I baked it at 350 F for 10 minutes.

The chocolate pudding is this one, halved and veganised. (I added a tiny bit of liquid smoke but it was pretty subtle.)

The marshmallow topping went like this:

75 g chickpea liquid
75 g sugar
pinch of cream of tartar
0.5 g xanthan gum
vanilla
--whipped together

Then things get a little bit hazy...
I heated up agar (0.7 g?) with water (not a lot) and sugar (some). It got to at least 108 C (I was originally planning on letting it get to 118, but it was starting to look right so I pulled it early.) I poured this mix down the side of the mixer bowl as it mixed the meringue on high speed. (This is based on my recipe for marshmallows, but with more liquid [here the chickpea liquid is straight out of the can, not reduced]. It ends up marshmallowy but softly set.)

Spread the marshmallow topping on top of the pudding. Put it under the grill and watch it carefully. Put it in the fridge to set up.

Birthday cake

Not the prettiest, but the tastiest:

I made pistachio dacquoise, using my recipe but with chickpea liquid instead of versawhip. I didn't bother with heating the agar mix, I just mixed everything together and assumed that the agar would activate during the baking. (To be honest, I'm actually not even sure whether the agar and xanthan are necessary.)

The filling was a salted caramel mousse, based on a peanut butter mousse from The Voluptuous Vegan. Each dacquoise disk had one side painted with melted chocolate with some roughly ground coriander seeds and some dehydrated ground whole lemon mixed in. I thought I would make some beautiful swirls of chocolate on top but... well, you can see how well that worked. (I didn't count on the chocolate solidifying immediately on the cold mousse!)

I was aiming for the dacquoise to soften slightly, but hoped the chocolate would prevent that from happening too fast. After sitting for about 4 hours, the disks were still quite crisp. 24 hours later, they were quite soggy. Somewhere in between they would've been perfect. The flavour, though, was amazing. I got the idea for the flavour combination from this recipe for Pistachio Millionaire's Shortbread.

Lemon ice box pie

Well, actually, since this was just a test run, I skipped the biscuit-crumb base, so technically this is just lemon ice box pie filling, veganised. I wish I'd made a whole pie: this was fantastic!

I read about this pie in the Tipsy Baker's review of John Besh's book My Family Table (searchable on Google Books). You fold a lemon/sweetened condensed milk mixture through whipped egg whites and freeze, for something that is almost better than a perfect bite of lemon meringue pie. (I say almost because the one thing you are missing is that touch of caramelised meringue. Still, this is really delicious and perfect in its own way: a fluffy sweet lemon mousse-meringue.)

Here's what I did:

14 oz (1 3/4 cups) sweetened condensed soymilk*
1/2 cup lemon juice
3 t lemon zest
1/4 t salt
144 g chickpea liquid
pinch of cream of tartar
2 T sugar
0.8 g xanthan gum
60 ml water
0.8 g agar powder

Mix together the sweetened condensed soymilk, lemon juice, lemon zest and salt.
In a stand mixer, whip the chickpea liquid, cream of tartar, sugar and xanthan gum until you have a nice firm meringue.
Put 60 ml of the condensed soymilk mixture in a small saucepan with the water. Whisk in the agar, and bring to the boil. Simmer a couple of minutes to activate the agar, and then with the stand mixer going on high, pour the agar mixture down the side of the bowl and whip until it is well incorporated.
Fold the meringue into the condensed soymilk mixture, and freeze for at least three hours.

=======================
* Sweetened condensed soymilk =  3 parts by volume Better than Milk original soymilk powder, 2 parts sugar, 1 part boiling water, and 3 T vegan butter per cup of soymilk powder, processed in a blender until smooth. (It makes just slightly more than the volume of milk powder you use: so if you need 1 cup of condensed soymilk, use 1 cup of powder, and you will end up with a little bit leftover.)