I have to say it…I am loving the extra time at home gifted by the pandemic. It seems there are a lot of people finding it hard to stay home and stay away from other people, and a lot of people are in risky situations daily; I feel for those people, but I don’t feel the stress they seem to be feeling. The loss of life and the fear aside, this has been a positive experience for me so far. I have found myself pausing to enjoy life more often, taking time to watch the sun rise and set, to watch the insects in the plants in the garden and to enjoy the company of all the small creatures around me. I have had time to work on home projects that have been sitting idle for a long time (some of them, a very long time) and time to fiddle around in the kitchen too. Yesterday I made the easiest vegan butter ever, for baking with.

I really wanted to make some chocolate chip biscuits, the thought wouldn’t leave my mind while I fed animals and pulled weeds. I didn’t have any butter in the fridge (we don’t use it much any more) and the biscuits made with oil always seem a bit odd tasting to me.

So….I made a batch of vegan butter to bake with. This butter is a little different to my usual recipe. The usual recipe uses coconut oil as the fat component, I was out of refined coconut oil, so I wondered if I could substitute another oil (the answer is ‘yes, you can’). I also didn’t have any lecithin and I wondered if it was strictly necessary (the answer is ‘no, not really’), so the resulting quick batch of vegan butter was whipped up and baked into choc chip biscuits in no time at all.

I started with a cup full of almonds that I ground up in the blender as fine as possible (this turned out less fine than I wanted, but still workable).

I added the other ingredients to the almond mash;

1 cup soy milk

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 cup vegetable oil (rice bran and olive oils this time)

1 teaspoon apple cider vinegar

1 tablespoon nutritional yeast

I blended this lot up for about a minute and when I stopped it had become butter.

The consistency is soft, like a really thick sauce, and it needs to be refrigerated for a few hours to be usable as a spread.

I just measured it out into my biscuit dough and made my long awaited choc chip biscuits.

They were yummy!!!

The green sheets are my new silicon baking sheets. They are completely washable and reusable. I hope these will allow me to stop using baking paper, and give me one less item to buy in the supermarket.