It was my birthday yesterday! My friends came over in nice clothes and we had a barbecue in my garden – we all finished the night happily stuffed with lovely food, Pimms and very strong mojitos :) we had a lovely time and it was a really nice last night all together before university term starts again. A lot of the food we had wasn’t vegan (most was completely vegetarian though, except some of the BBQ food, Matt insisted on having meat) because all of my friends eat dairy, but I thought I’d post recipes of everything we ate anyway, including some guest posts that might appear in the near future from my best friend Georgie, who made amazing Hummingbird cupcakes, and my Mum, who made my birthday cake. Another best friend Emily also made vegan chai brownies, which were utterly delicious, but I sadly forgot to take a photo of them, so I found a recipe online that I think she must have used, because she said she had to pour brewed tea into the mixture - http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/9601/vegan-chai-spiced-brownies.aspx

I also got some wonderful presents, including the Great British Bake Off book (definitely trying the Key Lime Pie that was such a hit on last week’s show), Matcha green tea powder, some Cath Kidston stuff (Matt’s mum bought me a really sweet Cath Kidston apron!) and some home-made posters from Matt’s brother which made me crease with laughter :) I also found it hilarious that almost every single person who bought me presents or cards used cupcake wrapping paper or cupcake cards – they know me well!

In all, there was a BBQ, pasta salad, cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches (yeah, I know), violet creams, cheesecakes, custard creams, macarons, my birthday cake and a lot of Pimms and mojitos. This is a recipe for individual passion fruit and ginger cheesecakes that my Dad used to make, and I really wanted to try and make again – my friends all liked them, which is a good sign!

Passion Fruit Cheesecakes

Ingredients

12 ginger nuts (Tesco’s basics ones are vegan)

40g of vegan margarine

70ml of natural soy yoghurt

200g of vegan soft cheese

The juice and zest of two lemons

40g of caster sugar

Three passion fruits

Method

1. Melt the margarine and stir it into the crushed ginger nuts, then pat them into the bottom of six ramekin dishes.
2. Mix the yoghurt, cheese, sugar and lemon together and divide the mixture between the ramekins. Scoop the seeds out of the passion fruits and top the cheesecakes with half a passion fruit each. Put in the fridge overnight to firm up.

Makes six

All The Food

P.S. I’m having a competition to raise money for the eating disorders charity Beat – if you enter it then you’ll have a chance to to win loads of vegan goodies: http://www.justgiving.com/emilycooksvegan