Coconut Butter

Yesterday I told you how awesome Chocolate-Covered Katie's vegan chocolate fudge is. Well, here's how to make the key ingredient, Coconut Butter. Trust me, this will revolutionise your baking, cooking and eating life!

Coconut Butter Recipe

Ingredients

• Coconuts
• Coconut Oil

Method

1. Take the hair off the coconut.
2. Pierce the eyes and drain the coconut.
3. Wrap the coconut in a towel and beat it with a hammer until it shatters. (This bit is immensely satisfying!)
4. Pry the coconut flesh out of the shell, then carefully cut off the brown skin outside of the coconut flesh.
5. Use a juice extractor to get the coconut milk out of the coconut flesh (Hmm, coconut milk. Sooo good in cocoa!)
6. Lightly toast the coconut in a pan, over a low heat. Toast until just brown.
7. Once the coconut has cooled, blend it in a food processor until smooth.
8. Add coconut oil and blend until it looks like coconut butter - smooth and creamy and awesome.

Coconut butter is great as frosting on cakes and cupcakes, spread on bread or toast, or eaten from the jar! (Assuming it makes it into a jar). You can use coconut butter to make the fudge yesterday, or as an ingredient in baking, in the place of nut butter or flour.

Coconut Flour Brownies

These brownies are cakey and delicious - hard to stop eating! I'm sure they'd be great with the marshmallow frosting, too.

Coconut Flour Brownies

Ingredients

• 1 cup of dessicated coconut
• 4 eggs
• 2 bananas
• 1tsp vanilla extract (NOT essence)
• 3 tbsp honey (or more, to taste)
• 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1 tbsp lemon juice or apple cider vinegar
• 3 tbsp cocoa (or more, to taste)

Method

1. Heat the oven to 180C.
2. Lightly toast the coconut until just golden.
3. Blend the toasted coconut until very fine.
4. Grease and line a square baking tin (the baking paper is important, otherwise it sticks).
5. Blend all the ingredients except the lemon juice/vinegar in the blender until smooth.
6. Add the vinegar/lemon juice and blend some more.
7. Pour the mixture into the baking tray and bake for about 25 - 30 minutes, just until a skewer comes out clean. These should be a little moist.
8. Cool slightly then chop into squares and serve.

Every one a coconut.

After the coconut milk had been made,  I still had no inclination to get to “work”, and besides, I was technically in the middle of home school. So while I listened to the girls reading, I made ice cream and macaroons.

The ice cream was a big hit and super easy:

• 1 banana


• 1 cup of coconut milk


• as much vanilla essence as you like (or none at all – I used just shy of a teaspoon)


• honey (I used aboout 1.5 tablespoons, and found it rather sweet)

Blend everything well in a food processor, then freeze. This amount of mixture made six ice lollies, and froze reasonably fast. It was delicious but I think next time I will take it out of the freezer and beat it a couple of times to get the crystals out. If chocolate was allowed on the SCD I would definitely dunk the ice lollies in melted chocolate. So much of nice.

The macaroons were less successful. I’ve made macaroons many times and while I’m no Daniela, they’ve always been edible and in most cases people ask for more.

Not today.

I think I hadn’t squeezed enough coconut milk out of the coconut, and I also substituted honey for sugar, so almost immediately my light and fluffy egg whites swirled into slightly separated strangeness. I thought a tablespoon of macadamia nut butter would help to reconstitute the mass into something that would sort-of hold together, but that was a mistake and I knew that before I even opened the jar.

It wasn’t all bad, because after 20 minutes of baking, the macaroons began to resemble the correct consistency. I let them cool, scraped them into a bowl, and formed the lot into 9 little balls. Baking these yielded something … well … something. But it’s edible. And you don’t need a spoon.

I won’t post the recipe until I have one that works.

Coco Mojo

Yesterday was a good day. Full of energy and accomplishment, it was the kind of day I wish every day was. Having worked until nearly 2AM the night before, when I had put my house in order by 7AM, I was disinclined to do any billable work. (Funny, that). So instead I “supervised” the girls as they sorted out their room. This process was made both more and less difficult by their best friend spending the day with us. She helped a lot, but the three girls can never spend more than a few minutes together without collapsing in giggles, and I didn’t have the heart to unleash Mean Momma on their hilarity.

We only started “school” around 9:30!



“Stuart Little 3: Call of the Wild” has great special features, including an art lesson!

BFF (Tinkerbell) was visiting because she’d begged her mom to let her come and try a day of home school with us. We started by hacking open a coconut*, moved on to reading, made coconut milk, studied the Bible, made coconut ice-cream, then took a break. After lunch Papa Bear helped them to make hovercrafts to study the effects of air pressure, then moved on to an art lesson. Since we’re currently looking at identifying the shapes within objects, we decided to use the “learn to draw” part of the Stuart Little 3 DVD for today’s lesson. We drew Snowbell and Reeko, but by Stuart we were pooped. Although Goldilocks was up to the challenge of creating the little mouse, and did a good job, too.

I made the left over “dessicated” coconut into arguably the worst macaroons in the world, although they were better after I rebaked them, having dried out a little the first time around.

Papa Bear played tag with the girls out front while I made supper. They laughed and played and frequently declared, “Daddy needs to be disciplined!” This out burst was followed by well-intentioned beatings with a miniature yard broom, rendered utterly jelly-like as a result of mirth-overdose.

Dinner was delicious, despite Tinkerbell’s absence (she’d already gone home), and everyone relaxed in front of an animated movie afterwards. *Bliss*.

Why can’t every day be like this?

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*More on the coconut to follow.