Recipe: Raw Vegan Mini Christmas Puddings!

Hannah over at Wayfaring Chocolate keeps on putting up these fascinating raw vegan truffle recipes.  Today was supposed to be my day for making mince pies (and the day isn’t over yet…), but I thought it might be fun to try making her Anzac truffles and her chocolate and cherry truffles as well.  Anyway, as I was out and about getting my mince pie ingredients and wondering what to blog about today, it suddenly occurred to me – maybe I could cross Hannah’s truffle recipes with my fruit mince recipe and make teeny tiny Vegan Christmas puddings! 

(Incidentally, this also counts as reason 43,586 why Catherine is insane, because I already have a house full of confectionery leftovers, as well as seven separate packages and boxes of chocolate, cookies and stollen given to me by lovely people in my lab, and there is no way I’m having Christmas without my mince pies, so making three kinds of vegan truffle is probably excessive.  On the other hand, I’m not really eating properly at the moment and all I really want is sweet stuff, and at least these are a healthy form of sweet.  Says she, rationalising madly.)

Anyway, I’m rather proud of these.  Not only do they look incredibly cute, they do taste very Christmas-puddingy, and not too regrettably healthy.  Best of all, they take about ten minutes to make – much more suitable for the Australian climate than the traditional variety.

Your shopping list

60 g raw cashews

60 g almonds (I cheated and went with roasted, but raw would work)

30 g desecrated coconut

pinch salt

1 small carrot, grated

50 g raisins

50 g currants

50 g sultanas

50 g mixed peel

4 dried figs

2 dried or glacé peaches or apricots

zest of one orange

1/2 teaspoon cinnamon

pinch each of nutmeg and allspice

30 ml brandy (or orange juice)

30 ml agave nectar

1-2 tablespoons orange juice

150 g icing sugar (yes, I know, icing sugar doesn’t seem to be something that raw food people eat, but these look so cute with icing!)

red and green glace cherries, finely chopped

 

Now what will you do with it?

Put the nuts, coconut and salt in a food processor and pulse until very finely chopped.  Add the carrot, all the dried fruit, orange zest and spices, and process until finely chopped and beginning to come together a little.  Add the brandy and agave nectar and process until it begins to form a ball around the blade of the processor (this doesn’t take long).

With damp hands, form the mixture into balls somewhere between chestnut and golf ball size, and refrigerate.

Make a very basic icing by adding the orange juice to the icing sugar until you have a slightly runny icing, and drizzle this over the puddings.  Decorate with a few pieces of glace cherry.  So cute!

Store in the fridge.  You should get 12-16 balls from this recipe, incidentally.

Variations

These are already gluten-free and vegan, of course.  Nut free might be a problem – you can replace some of the nuts with oats, or you could skip the nuts entirely, double the fruit, and have a much denser, wetter truffle, much like my apricot balls.  And you don’t have to decorate them if you don’t want to, of course.  I just thought that made them look prettier…