Vegan White Chocolate!



The Martha Stewart's Cookies cookbook (which I blogged about previously), contains a recipe for a vanilla sandwich cookie with a raspberry-white chocolate filling — something which caught my interest immediately. Unfortunately, white chocolate, by definition, contains milk ingredients. I've been keeping an eye out for a dairy-free substitute, but have come up empty-handed. The lack of choice as far as vegan white chocolate is concerned is known within the vegan community.

In light of the fact that I haven't found any commercially-available white chocolate substitutes, I decided to look around for recipes for vegan white chocolate instead. It was during my search that I stumbled upon BitterSweet's recipe for vegan white chocolate. Subsequent searching for an edible cocoa butter yielded the discovery that NOW Foods produces a food-grade cocoa butter. I use their shea butter as a moisturizer, and recognized that Ambrosia carries both!

A trip to Ambrosia provided me with the cocoa butter and soy milk powder I needed for the recipe, and I made my white chocolate yesterday. It is, of course, all gone now. :)

The cocoa butter doesn't set up as smoothly as I would like (which I suspect is partly due to the graininess of the vanilla bean flecks and mostly due to the lack of emulsifiers), but — after years and years of being unable to eat white chocolate — I was happy to find the flavour and texture of the vegan version remarkably accurate! I have little doubt that I'll be making batches for further baking adventures in the near future.