Vegan Strawberry Rhubarb Shortcake

 

 

VEGAN STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE is easy to make. Up where I live it is now or never. My fourteen-year-old twins are picking berries for a nearby organic farm, and they tell me the season is almost over.

I've already mentioned how to make tofu whipped cream — look at my archived recipes for that under chocolate pudding. I am finding I like the whipped cream with a can of light coconut milk blended in with it too. It makes it taste less like soy. You can either thicken it with more oil (or use regular coconut milk), or you can try to thicken it with a teaspoon of guar gum. I suggest mixing guar gum into the dry sugar before blending it with the wet ingredients, to keep it from clumping. Oh, what the heck — I'll give you the recipe again.

COCONUT-TOFU WHIPPED TOPPING

 

Ingredients

1 package — Morinu tofu — I use the organic one

1 15-ounce can — light coconut milk

¼ cup — organic sugar mixed with

1 tsp — guar gum

1 tsp — vanilla extract

Sprinkle — salt

½ — lemon, squeezed

Method

Blend all that together until smooth, and refrigerate in a jar until you are ready to pour it over your shortcakes.

VEGAN SHORTCAKE

 

 

Ingredients

4 cups — whole wheat pastry flour (or a mixture of white and whole wheat flours)

1/4-1/2 cup — Sucanat brown sugar

1 and 1/2 Tblsp. — baking powder
1/4 tsp — salt

1/2 cup (plus a little more if it doesn't look pebbly enough) — sunflower oil

1 1/2 cups (plus a little bit more until it all holds together in a ball) — water

Method

Preheat oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit.

Mix together the flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Use a fork to mix in the oil until the flour looks crumbly, dry, and pebble-like.

Add in the water gradually, until it can all be kneaded lightly into a moist but not wet ball. You want it to hold together and not look floury any more, but be very careful with the last amount of water so it doesn't get too wet, which can happen quickly. If for some reason it gets too wet, don't freak out — just add a little more flour and knead it in.

Pat this resultant dough into a cast iron frying pan and bake it in the preheated oven for 20-30 minutes or until it is slightly browned. If you press the middle, it feels cooked through.

This makes enough for, at the most, eight people or four really hungry people. You can carefully slice it through horizontally to insert some strawberries there, if you want to make it look bigger. Or you could double the recipe and make two of them.

I assume you know to wash two quarts of organic strawberries and slice them up, perhaps with a sprinkle of sugar.

What I also like to do is make a sauce to pour over the shortcake, which helps to moisten it. If you don't have a lot of strawberries, or if they are too expensive to buy very many, then you can extend the sauce with rhubarb. Luckily we have a clump in the yard.

STRAWBERRY-RHUBARB SAUCE

 

Ingredients

1 large bunch — rhubarb stalks

½ cup — water

½ cup — organic sugar

Handful — sliced strawberries

Method

Cut off the leaf portion of the rhubarb stalk if you pick your own. Rhubarb leaves are inedible. Cut the stalks into 1-inch pieces and fit them into a sauce pan with the water and sugar and handful of strawberries, cooking them until they are soft and mushy. This doesn't take long. If you do it sooner than the other parts of the recipe, it will have time to cool.

Anyhow, then just assemble the shortcakes, pouring the strawberry-rhubarb sauce over them, topping them with the pretty sliced strawberries and a dollop of the coconut soy whipped cream. Even people who think vegans eat weird foods will like this dessert. Maybe you don't even have to mention that it's different.