Family-Size Festive Mince Pie [Vegan]

* This recipe was first published in December 2017. The page was updated in December 2019

Hello everyone! I hope your preparations for the festive holiday are going well. Hopefully you’ve been a bit more organised than me. As usual, I’ve left a lot of shopping and food preparation to the last minute, so today – Christmas Eve – is going to be one very busy day for me! However, before I crack on with the preparations, I thought I would share one last recipe on the blog before 2017 comes to a close. The recipe is for a giant-sized mince pie, which is just perfect for sharing with friends and family this season. I’ve already made three of these pies in the past week, and no doubt I will making more in the lead up to the New Year.

During the festive season, my family loves to have home-made mince pies for dessert, drizzled in custard or cream. However, while they taste delicious, individual mince pies do tend to look a bit lost on dessert plates and aren’t what I would consider ‘special enough’ to serve to dinner guests. To resolve this, I’ve played around with my favourite mince pie recipe and created a family-sized pie instead, which can be sliced and served on a plate with a more appealing presentation.

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Vegan Carrot Cake with Cream Cheese Frosting

Today, I’m finally publishing my recipe for vegan carrot cake. It contains no dairy or eggs, yet tastes just as good (if not better!) than its traditional counterpart. This was the cake that I chose to bake for my mum’s and father-in-law’s birthdays this year and I’m pleased to say, it went down a treat!

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Chocolate Banana Ice Cream Cups

In this month’s Vegan Life magazine, one recipe that instantly caught my eye was Niomi Smart’s Banana Mocha Ice Cream Cups.

I love chocolate banana ice cream!  It’s so simple and cheap to make (costing literally a few pence per serving), yet it feels like a real treat. It also happens to be packed full of healthy ingredients, including an array of minerals and antioxidant goodness.

Healthy, decadent, cheap and quick. No surprises why this is one of my favourite desserts to make!

I’ve been making banana ice cream for a few years now, and have learnt a few tricks along the way to make the process even quicker and easier. For example, I used to slice the bananas and arrange them in single layers in freezer bags prior to freezing, however I’ve since discovered that bananas can be sliced from frozen using a sharp knife. These days, I simply pop whole bananas in the freezer stacked in plastic containers with a layer of parchment paper in between to stop them sticking together.

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Easy Vegan Pecan Pie

In today’s post, I’m sharing a recipe for an easy vegan pecan pie. This dish will be perfect for serving in the upcoming festive season. It looks impressive and slices beautifully.

Pecan pie hails from the southern US states. After a google search, I discovered that it’s traditionally made with eggs, butter, refined sugar and corn syrup. I decided to ditch all of these and use some of my favourite plant-based ingredients instead.

Easy Vegan Pecan Pie

For the crust, I use my ‘go to’ sweet pastry recipe (which I first shared in my Mince Pie post). I’ve never had a fail with this pastry and I love how crisp it turns out. Unlike many pastry recipes, it’s also palm-oil free as it uses coconut butter (the aroma-free/culinary kind) instead of dairy-free spread/vegan butter.

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Easy Vegan Mince Pies

When it comes to mince pies, for me, nothing beats home-made. Sure, my pies won’t be uniformly shaped and coloured like the factory-produced ones. And my stars are usually a little wonky. But hey, they taste REAL. Once you’ve tried home-made, I don’t think you’ll ever go back to shop-bought again.

If you’ve never baked your own mince pies before, you must give it a try. They’re incredibly easy to make. Even the pastry is a breeze.

Easy Vegan Mince Pies

The recipe I’m sharing today is for mini vegan mince pies. The size makes them perfect for serving with an ‘elevenses’ coffee or afternoon tea during the festive holidays. They’re small enough to not spoil your appetite, however, if you do fancy a second, you can tuck-in guilt-free as at least two minis is equivalent to one regular size pie.

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Chocolate Peppermint Cream Bars. Raw. Dairy-Free. Gluten-Free. Vegan.

Chocolate Peppermint Cream Bar

If you’re a long-time reader of my blog, you may remember my sad attempt to grow veggies a few years back. Everything I planted quickly got devoured by the gazillion veggie-loving critters that live in our garden. Some plants literally disappeared overnight :/

I’ve long since abandoned the veggie patch dream and my latest strategy is to leave the patch in a semi wild state and observe what will happily grow there with no intervention on my part. So far, amongst the multitude of wild flowers and “weeds”, I have three edible crops that are flourishing – Golden Raspberries, Lemon Balm and Chocolate Mint!

Chocolate Peppermint Plant

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