Vegan Danish Flødeboller

I have vegan friends and though we don't often have a chance to get together, when we do, I like to make treats for them! Last time they were in the area, I made vegan spice cupcakes with vegan cream cheese frosting, and vegan cinnamon rolls with more frosting. Wacky cake recipes by the way are fantastic, coincidentally vegan cakes, stemming from rationing in the Great Depression and world war 2; also called depression cake and crazy cake. I did a 4-H presentation with a partner on chocolate wacky cake for county fair in junior high.

Recently, I tried an aquafaba based meringue for the first time and was highly impressed. There are a number of meringue based desserts that use aquafaba and warn that it doesn't have the best holding quality. When I discovered these vegan flødeboller on the Little Blog of Vegan, she took the time to reduce the aquafaba by half for a much more stable and more easily whipped up foam. Brilliant! I'm glad that was my first experience, because there are times when I want to try a recipe, say for a drink or dessert, and don't really care to use raw egg white foam. I very much appreciate Holly's experience and techniques for using aquafaba!

These are hard to cut in half without destroying
the Oreo! Best to just enjoy them out of hand.

These little treats are fairly sweet and I would probably use Oreo thins next time, or since über strict vegans don't count Oreos as truly vegan, find or make a vegan chocolate wafer. But for many vegans, my friends included, Oreos are happily and acceptably, "accidentally vegan". Plus it makes this an easier dessert, having a ready made base! But feel free to make your own vegan cookie base if you like. A shortbread style cookie that is not too sweet would be perfect. These are fairly sweet treats, particularly the cookies and cream one. The freeze dried strawberries give a nice tart flavor to balance the sweet for the meringue. Incidentally, the non-vegan versions are more like marshmallow fluff in the filling because of the egg whites. These are more like an Italian meringue buttercream because of the added butter. Still soft and airy, but less marshmallowy. I am fairly certain that you could stop at the point right before adding the butter and icing sugar to the meringue and get that fluff like consistency for the Italian meringue variation on the filling. Then gently fold in the ground cookies/freeze dried strawberries.

Funnily enough, my hubby actually quietly made half the batch of the strawberry flavored ones disappear, straight out of the freezer. Kiddos are not super big frosting people and said it was okay but wouldn't be their first choice. I guess I did a decent job regulating their sweet tooth while they were little! (They might like the marshmallowy version better.) Freezing also reduces the perception of sweetness, an interesting little physiological factoid. So if your ice cream mix tastes perfect to you before freezing, it will be a little under-sweetened after freezing. That was something we factored in when I helped develop the mix recipe for Tully's coffee soft serve when the brick and mortar shops were still around. Such a loss, they were so much better than Starbuck's. Yeah, I said it. It's true. Also, R&D is an interesting and very involved process! That was such a great experience, I wish my old company had survived the huge conglomerate freeze out. Tully's lasted longer than us and I don't know who made the mix with our recipe after the company closed. RIP. (Ok, A.I. tells me that a company called Seattle's Dream Cream took over after us and they claim to have helped create it, so I'm not sure if they reworked the formula after us or if they helped with the original mix as well. I remember me and my boss working on it in my lab in 2001/2002; he was a fantastic food scientist. And our facility produced the mix for a couple years. Such a great company, ah nostalgia.)

Vegan Oreo Flødeboller
makes 10 treats

20 Oreo cookies

110g of chickpea brine (aquafaba)
140g of granulated / caster sugar
30ml of water
tiny pinch of sea salt
¼ teaspoon of cream of tartar
125g of dairy-free butter or vegan shortening, cut into small pieces
25g of icing sugar

140g of dairy-free dark chocolate or compound chocolate

Set aside 10 of the Oreos to be the base of the treats. Grind the remaining 10 Oreos into crumbs and set aside.

For the meringue frosting:

In a small saucepan, heat the chickpea brine (aquafaba) over medium-low heat. Cook until it has reduced by half its volume. (That will be 55g by weight.) Once finished, remove from the heat and set aside to cool slightly.

Add 100g of the sugar into the water in a small saucepan. Heat over medium heat and bring to a simmer/low boil. Bring the mixture up to 240°F. This will take around 10 minutes. Use a calibrated candy thermometer to verify the temperature.

In the meantime, pour the prepared aquafaba into a clean bowl or stand mixer and add in the cream of tartar. Whisk on high for 5-8 minutes until soft peaks form.

Add in the remaining 40g of sugar and the pinch of salt, and continue to whisk until thick and glossy.

When the sugar syrup has reached 240º, turn down the speed of the mixer. Slowly drizzle the hot syrup down the inside edge of the bowl, then turn up the speed again and whip until incorporated. Continue to whip the mixture until the sugar syrup has cooled down and the bowl is fully cool to the touch.

Add in the dairy-free butter, a couple pieces at a time until it has all been added and incorporated. Once all the butter has been added the mixture should be thick like buttercream. Continue to whisk on medium / high for 3-5 minutes until very fluffy.*

Add in the icing sugar and ground Oreo cookies, mixing for another minute or so to combine.

Transfer the finished ‘cookies and cream’ filling into a piping bag fitted with a large round tip nozzle and pipe a high swirl onto each Oreo wafer.

Place the treats into the fridge or freezer to set while preparing the chocolate for the coating. The filling should be firm enough be dunked in the chocolate without sliding off the base.

Chocolate coating:

Melt the chocolate over a double boiler or in the microwave, stirring until smooth and fully melted.

Pour the melted chocolate into a glass or bowl that is deep enough to dunk the swirls.

Once the chocolate is ready, dunk the Oreo cream into the chocolate. Allow any excess to drip off back into the bowl/glass and place to set on waxed or parchment paper. The chocolate will set quickly on the chilled filling. If desired, immediately sprinkle some extra Oreo crumbs over the coating before it sets.

Keep chilled until serving, in an airtight container.

* Just like regular buttercream, if it seems broken, it's almost certainly a temperature issue. Just keep whipping and it will eventually come together either with either an ice pack on the sides or letting it warm up just a bit if it cooled too much before emulsifying.

Vegan Chocolate Covered Strawberry Flødeboller
makes 10-12 treats

follow directions as for Oreo version, except substitute:

10 Golden Oreos in place of chocolate (I used Oreo Thins for the strawberry version)
2 small pkg (12g each) freeze dried strawberries (about a heaping ½ cup), powdered
extra freeze dried strawberries, crumbled (for garnish)

Substitute the powdered strawberries for the ground Oreos when mixing in the icing sugar into the meringue buttercream. (You could also add maybe 5 golden Oreos, ground into fine crumbs at this time to help yield a more stable/firmer filling. I did not do that this time and the filling was softer than for the cookies and cream.) Pipe the filling onto the Golden Oreo bases. Sprinkle crumbled freeze dried strawberries on the chocolate immediately after dipping. Keep the strawberries in an airtight container between sprinkles, they will pull humidity and soften quickly.

I actually quite liked this version frozen!