Hope you don’t mind another post about blackberries, but “tis the season.” I’ve already filled my freezer with little purple cups of blackberry coulis, so after the third picking this week, it was time to do something different.

This latest batch of berries gave me the perfect opportunity to test drive a dessert from My Sweet Vegan, Hannah Kaminsky’s wonderfully creative dessert book. Until now, I had just been drooling over the amazing photographs, but the mountain of blackberries in my kitchen gave me all the excuse I needed to actually prepare a recipe.

The Brilliant Berry Parfaits were an obvious choice and they turned out great. I substituted blackberries for the blueberries in the recipe and I opted for a basic vegan whipped cream garnish instead of the maple cream called for in the book.

This dessert is sublime and I could have stopped there, but I still had unspoken for berries and Jon was whining about his favorite dessert, vegan cheesecake. In this heat, I didn’t want to turn on the oven, and Hannah came to the rescue again with her Mini Icebox “Cheese” Cake, which goes into the freezer instead of the oven.

In addition to making a blackberry “jam” for the topping, I added some pureed blackberries to the filling as a replacement for the liquid in the recipe, thus adding an additional whisper of blackberries to the dessert. The “cheese”cake turned out great — the taste and texture reminded me of a mascarpone semi-freddo from my pre-vegan days.

I’m usually too busy testing my own recipes to try anyone else’s, but in the case of My Sweet Vegan, I’m glad I did. This is a dessert cookbook that grabs your attention with gorgeous photographs and follows through with terrific recipes. Do you enjoy this book as much as I do?

Labels: blackberries, blackberry cheesecake, blackberry parfaits, Hannah Kaminsky, My Sweet Vegan