Adventures in raw cooking, and a raw lemon-lavender cheesecake

My yoga journey has taken me to another yoga retreat, this time a day retreat (does it really count?) by the lovely Natasha Kerry.

What intrigued me about this one is that it included a raw food lunch followed by a raw food demonstration. When I booked this, I had no idea what raw food meant (other than the obvious of course) and had not dabbled in it at all, unless you count salads and other raw assemblies. I realised later that the healthy chocolate treats I made are actually a raw food and a variation of a raw brownie.

I now know that raw food involves not heating food above around 115 F (around 40 degrees C) so it doesn't have to be cold food. This however means that you can't have any pasta, rice or quinoa (yes, really, no pasta! This is never really going to work!). Although you can use a dehydrator (or apparently attempt this with an oven) to make crackers and other crispy things like kale chips to add a bit more texture. And weirdly, it involves a lot of soaking of nuts that are then blended to make cream fillings or cheese. 

Our lunch was actually surprisingly delicious and filling:

Warmish smoky red pepper soup with kale chips

Salad of rocket and figs stuffed with macadamia nut cheese

Carrot 'pasta' with asparagus and macadamia nut 'blue' cheese

Cheesecake with mango chutney

Although I do not see myself replacing my beloved pasta with carrot ribbons or courgette spirals, I can see the benefit of introducing a few things from the raw diet into mine, in particular the deserts and possibly the cheese (I have just ordered a cloth, let's see if I ever use it now!).

So, in the spirit of raw, I decided to attempt a raw and vegan (I think, apparently honey is not vegan though!) cheesecake that I found on this lovely website. This is a lavender cheesecake with lemon and honey, and thus a great opportunity to use up the 'cooking' lavender that I was gifted over Christmas.

The idea is to use creamed cashews instead of cream cheese and a nut/date mixture for the base instead of the crushed biscuits. I was a bit dubious about the cashews serving as an adequate substitute for cream cheese, but actually, after soaking in warm water for an hour (does that still count as raw?  I don't know!) they could be blitzed to a lovely creamy consistency.

Its not a looker, I agree, but still tasty! Need to get better with the parchment paper placement

The verdict: I think cashew cream flavoured with your chosen cheesecake topping can serve as an excellent substitute for cream cheese and has a really nice consistency. In this particular case, I thought that the lemon was overpowering and I could barely taste the lavender. Now, I will admit that this may be partly my fault, as I got confused with the cup measurements (why can't everyone just use grams??) and just ended up adding what I thought was correct - I should have just done it to taste instead.

The other issue I had is that the base didn't really stick together. I thought that perhaps more dates were necessary to hold the mixture together, and might try and experiment with that next time. It might also again be partially my fault, as I used a mixture of hazelnuts, pecans and ground almonds, and perhaps the ground almonds were a little too fine to hold together.

You can see here where I tried to cut a slice and the base crumbled off

Anyway, this was an interesting experiment, and I am looking forward to trying out more raw/vegan cakes!