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Healthy Vegan Chocolate Frosting

November 2, 2016 · Natalie 24 Comments

Creamy, luxurious frosting with no butter, oil, or sugar. This vegan chocolate frosting is easy to make with only 3 healthy ingredients and a serving of plant-based protein!

This never would’ve happened if it weren’t for that cupcake. This whole out of the ordinary posting on a Wednesday thing, it’s all that little purple-flecked cupcake’s fault. Here’s what happened…

My camera memory card was almost full but I tried to shoot a quick frosting-making clip anyways. So naturally it cut off right in the middle. Without the pouring of the almond milk part it was totally unusable footage, so I had to redo it.

Refilming frosting-making leads to extra frosting. Extra frosting calls for cupcake baking to use it up. Freshly frosted cupcakes demand purple sprinkles. Purple sprinkles lead to photogenic cupcakes that I have to take at least 68 shots of because the lighting was just too good not to. So many photos results in at least a 3 or 4 good shots. And 3 or 4 good cupcake shots–well that’s reason enough for a frosting post!

So actually I guess in a way it was my memory card’s fault, wasn’t it?

Okay but I’m going to stick with the cupcake-was-too-cute story because the formatting-my-memory-card-freaks-me-out-so-I-put-it-off-as-long-as-possible story is just a little too real.

Originally I was just going to tack this creamy, fudgy, fat-free frosting onto tomorrow’s similarly chocolatey recipe, but it’s magically delicious enough to deserve it’s own personal url.

I’ve made date chocolate frosting before, but never like this. Usually I make the entire thing in a blender, which calls for a much higher liquid to dry ingredient ratio. But if you blend the date paste first on it’s own and then do the rest of the mixing by hand, ultra thick and rich but still low fat frosting is a very real possibility. And by possibility I mean thing. And by thing I mean you NEED to try it on a cupcake asap!

To keep this vegan chocolate frosting recipe date-sweetened and refined sugar free, the dry ingredients must all be chocolate powders of some sort. No icing sugar. You could make it with cacao/cocoa powder as the only dry ingredient, but let’s just say that would be one intense frosting! I much prefer to use 50/50 ratio of chocolate protein powder and cacao powder. Or even all chocolate protein powder if you have one that tastes really, really good!

If your protein powder is the kind that is nasty and gritty and only barely edible if buried under 27 other ingredients in a smoothie, then I don’t advise using it in this recipe. I used my go-to: Sprout Living Epic Protein because it’s delish. And since it only has actual real food ingredients and no funky stuff added in, it tastes really good in frosting form! Plus it already contains maca, cinnamon, and a bit of sea salt which all can only make a frosting taste that much better.

That is one of my Everything-Free Vanilla Cupcakes styling the frosting in these photos. Coming tomorrow–a non cupcake fudgy frosting vehicle…

Healthy Vegan Chocolate Frosting

★★★★★ 5 from 3 reviews

Prep Time: 5 minutes
Total Time: 5 minutes
Yield: 0 Approximately 1.5 cups 1x

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Ingredients

Scale

Date Paste

1 cup pitted Medjool dates
1/2–2/3 cup water

Frosting

1/4 cup date paste (above)
1/2 cup chocolate protein powder * (I used Sprout Living Chocolate Maca Epic Protein)
3–4 tbsp nondairy milk

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Instructions

Blend the ingredients for the date paste in a high speed blender until very smooth. Add just enough water to get it to blend.
Remove 1/4 cup and transfer to a mixing bowl. Put the rest in a jar and keep in the fridge for up to 5 days.
To the mixing bowl, add your dry ingredient(s) and 2-3 tablespoons nondairy milk.
Mix to form a thick but spreadable consistency, adding more nondairy milk if necessary.
Use immediately or keep in the fridge for 2-3 days. It will become harder when refrigerated so it is best to use fresh.

Notes

*Or 1/4 cup chocolate protein powder + 1/4 cup cacao powder, especially if your protein powder has that funky protein powder flavor.

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Vegan & Grain-Free Pumpkin Pie Cups

October 31, 2016 · Natalie 87 Comments

These easy healthy Vegan & Grain-Free Pumpkin Pie Cups are just like your favorite fall or Thanksgiving dessert but in a smaller, 6 ingredient form!

There have been Halloween monsters and Halloween movie tie-ins and plenty of pumpkin things to pick from. But it’s here, it’s here, it’s finally Halloween! The pumpkin-est day of the whole month, the whole season woohoo! (Actually National Pumpkin Day was last week apparently, but I think that’s a lie. October 31st still wins in my book.) All the spooky stuff has been leading up to this. So what to post…?

Ghost cookies? I somehow misplaced my ghost cookie cutter, could only find the bat one.

Caramel apples? Been there, done that, (really need to update those photos…truly frightening?).

Candy? I think this day has enough of that already.

An edible 3 story haunted house made entirely of cookies and candies complete with operable doors, illuminated windows, and marshmallow ghost residents? So predictable.

No, I was thinking something more sophisticated…

In my mind, the October to November transition marks the transition from funky frightening Halloween foods to the slightly more wholesome Thanksgiving foods that evoke thoughts of gratitude and…cornucopias?? Okay thanksgiving needs more mascots. Halloween has pumpkins, ghosts, witches, bats, mummies, etc, while all Thanksgiving has is the very un-vegan turkey and leaves pretty much!

Anyways…the one thing that I think bridges both holidays is pumpkin pie! Most other pumpkin desserts fall more into the Halloween category it seems, but pie somehow slips through. Personally I think it should be a year-round thing, as always-in-season as brownies, but two whole months is good too.

This Date-Sweetened Pumpkin Pie is my favorite full-sized pumpkin pie! Heck I love it so much I would happily make it and write a whole post about it all over again. But I think that would be weird for both of us. So instead I went smaller and simpler–Pumpkin Pie Cups! They qualify as fun because they are muffin-cup sized, but they also qualify as Thanksgiving table elegant because I didn’t paint jack-o-lantern faces on them with melted chocolate? Restraint.

The crust. I went in a slightly different direction than my usual style. I’ve made plenty of oat flour crusts before, but they are just never my favorite. Oat flour is a bit too chewy for the pie-crust job. Far from the ideal, flaky, perfect pie crust texture.

On a whim, I experimented with an almond flour + maple syrup crust combo and it turned out beautifully! Golden brown, flaky, and maple-sweet. I found using all maple syrup for the wet ingredients to be a little too sweet, so I swapped in water for some of it and the flavor was perfect. Plus you can’t beat the ease of a 2-ingredient press-in pie crust.

The filling. I was going to say this filling is inspired by these Pumpkin Pie Parfaits, but it’s really not inspired by so much as exactly the same. That creamy dreamy pudding bakes up into a perfect pumpkin pie texture–holding it’s shape when sliced but still with a creamy rich consistency. And no starch or thickener necessary.

Two ingredient crust. Four ingredient filling. In pie math that adds up to one really easy recipe!