All of the following recipes are easy to make and suitable for a plant based diet. They are free of gluten, refined sugar, flour, butter and eggs. Naturally dairy-free and many are raw vegan and paleo.
I try to bring out new recipes that haven’t been done before, sometimes it works and other times it doesn’t as you can see from the list below where I reflect on some of the failures. But everything that doesn’t work is a chance to reflect and improve and often several failures lead to a big success.
Each plant based recipe has a video if you click through to the full detailed recipe. This is a collection of all of my recipes released in 2018.
Nutella Chocolate Hazelnut Mousse
A simple dairy-free mousse made with hazelnuts, coconut and cacao that’s very impressive. No Nutella involved in this plant-based recipe – it’s just used to describe the taste.
Date Syrup – Natural Sweetener
The sweetener I always use if I’m not filming is this date syrup as its easy, cheap and contains the full fruit and all its fibre. Sadly because I do need the photos to look good I often use maple syrup as it’s more aesthetic. However was nice to see that my simple natural sweetener recipe was popular.
Even all the people taking the full video and posting on instagram without credit was in a way nice to know that my recipes / videos are good enough. Although just because someone provides something for free doesn’t mean they don’t value their work. I’ve been doing this video recipe filming thing for nearly 3 years, and am still surprised each one takes at least 2 days.
Lentil Protein Pancakes
Red lentils are fast becoming one of my favourite ingredients as they are so cheap, nutritious, versatile and so sustainable. It’s great to use lentils in recipes where they aren’t boiled so get a totally different texture.
2-Ingredient Chickpea Candy Clusters
Cooked chickpeas are baked to perfection then mixed with chocolate for a high protein and healthy candy. People are saying this healthy candy is a great pre-workout snack. Full of fibre and nutrition when made with a high cocoa chocolate.
Probably my biggest recipe of the year with over 2 million views! It has been imitated several times by other sites who all claim to have made the recipe up themselves by chance just a few weeks after mine went viral, and the recipe didn’t exist before I published it. Immitation is very flattering, I just wish people had more honesty and the imagination to name it something different!
Lentil Protein Bread
I love sharing recipes that are cheap, nutritious and easy. This lentil protein bread is so easy to make from very cheap red split lentils. This gluten free bread has a great texture from just blending and baking the lentils – no boiling required!
3 Ingredient Apple Almond Oat Breakfast Bars
I love making recipes that are just sweetened with fruit and these breakfast bars are sweetened purely with apples. The apples from my garden were pretty tart, but I quite liked this as it made them a bit sour and stopped me eating the whole batch quickly.
In the past I’ve avoided oats all together, but now including them occasionally seems to agree with my body. Banning natural foods that are minimally processed and nutritious can be a slippery slope. If you banned every natural thing that people some people have concerns with you would soon be left with nothing.
I do want to do something to address the hysteria over cold pressed unfiltered virgin coconut oil and olive oil. However every time I try to pen something it opens up a whole new can of health worms – like the ongoing disagreements over cholesterol, statins and heart disease.
Raw Cashew Butter
Making your own nut butter is super easy as modern blenders are so powerful and inexpensive. 15 years ago I paid £1000 for a high-speed blender and these days a blender that’s a fraction of the cost is powerful enough to make nut butter. Just pure raw cashew nuts are used to make this cashew butter. Cashew butter is not a complicated recipe but the video is worth watching to relax with.
Cheese and Onion Kale Chips
Of course, these “cheese” kale chips are free of dairy and vegan like all of my recipes! Nutritional yeast is mixed with sunflower seeds and dried to make a ridiculously healthy chip. It’s worth getting a dehydrator just to make raw kale chips!
Chocolate Avocado Lime Cheesecakes
This is a dream dessert with chocolate, lime, avocado and almonds all together in one tempting dessert. Some people don’t like the idea of avocado in a dessert but it’s just there for the healthy fats and as it has such a mild taste you can’t taste it!
I love the green of this dessert but when people know there’s avocado in it they swear they can taste it. For a non-green chocolate avocado check out my salted caramel avocado mousse.
2-Ingredient Onion Flax Bread
It’s a bit of reach calling this onion flax mixture bread but it proved to difficult to get a cracker consistency in an oven so settled for bread. If you have a dehydrator its easy to make onion flax crackers. However in the oven its too difficult and you need to be very good at spreading consistently the same thickness and keeping an eye on the oven.
3-Ingredient Chocolate Cookie Dough Bites
I’ve been eating more oats this year, not as a daily food in huge amount but more as one of hundreds of nutritious natural foods to include in a diet. I did avoid them before but my body seems to like having them now and again.
After having a vegan cheesecake with a base of just oats and dates I made this recipe up. Dates and oats together to taste great but at the same time they aren’t really addictive so just a couple is a great sweet fix. The photos are a bit fuzzy as it was so dark during the middle of the day – it’s always an issue in the winter months as I always photograph under natural daylight.
3-Ingredient Cherry Chocolate Balls
There’s something about the flavour of cherries that is just amazing. They have a sweet yet tart deep flavour that I just adore! This healthy candy recipe uses natural cherries sweetened with apple/pineapple juice (not glace cherries) and covered in dark chocolate for an amazing healthy treat. This bliss ball recipe also works just as well with dried cranberries.
Quinoa Veggie Burger Sliders
Make your own quinoa bread complete with veggie seed burgers. This high protein vegan burger is naturally free of gluten and nuts.
Raw Chocolate Fruit and Seed Bites
A healthy little candy that is not baked with a rich raw cacao taste. This year I’ve made a push to make more nut free recipes – it makes the plant based recipes cheaper and as it’s so easy to eat too many nuts I like to not have nuts every meal. Seeds are often raw and its far harder to overeat on. Some people say to have double the number of seeds compared to nuts.
Natural Cough and Cold Syrup
I’m a firm believer of letting food be your medicine and this natural cough syrup with pineapple, cayenne pepper, ginger and turmeric does help to soothe an inflamed throat and help get rid of mucus.
Kale Hummus and Sweet Potato Fries
I love baking sweet potatoes then serving with a high protein dip to make a complete meal. This hummus has added kale for a vibrant green colour and is bursting with nutrition. Kale hummus and baked sweet potato fries are a feast for the eyes and stomach.
Smoked Sunflower Kale Chips
This is one of my favourite recipes ever – sprouted sunflower seeds are blended with smoky paprika then dried on kale to make a healthy chip that tastes amazing that is very nutritious and high in protein.
This kale chip recipe wasn’t that popular for some reason – maybe because I didn’t use cashew nuts. But I still absolutely love it and always make it with sunflower seeds as it still tastes amazing. Maybe cashews will be a bit tastier but I already eat far too many cashews.
Chickpea Strawberry Cake
I love chickpea flour its so underused and such a useful healthy ingredient for plant based gluten free cooking. This cake uses beetroot and strawberry along with chickpeas to make a fluffy cake. Some did say it looked like a pork pie! You may want to ignore my photos and ice the inside.
Tropical Smoothie Fudge Bar
I created this plant based refined sugar free smoothie bar after seeing an unhealthy version in a shop that looked great with a white frosting. My version came out looking better than the original and tastes great with dried fruit and an amazing cashew cacao butter vanilla frosting.
Sadly my tropical smoothie fudge bar wasn’t that popular. Maybe it was using dried pineapple and cacao butter that made it to difficult to source and make? In all honestly, I only had cacao butter as my mum donated some that she had hanging around for years and dried pineapple happened to be on offer in my local health food shop. If you haven’t made recipes with cacao butter I suggest getting some virgin raw and using it if only for the beautiful aroma.
Beetroot and Bean Pots
I just love adding beetroot to dishes to get a bright red colour. I love the mixture of a bean and beetroot dip with bright green beans and wild rocket. This recipe was another bomb that people didn’t seem to like but it really should be given a chance!
Cacao Dusted Cashews – 3 Ingredients
These cashew treats were inspired by a trip to Bali and visiting a cashew factory. Eating local fresh produce and saving on heating during the Egnlish made the trip cost neutral, and also provided a welcome change from working at home. Sadly this wasn’t too popular – maybe because of the photos on grass made it look a bit too much like rabbit droppings. But a great recipe for some cacao cashew sweets.
Chocolate Kale Chips
Sunflower seeds and raw cacao are coated on kale then dried to make a dessert kale chip!
Quinoa Sundried Tomato Gluten Free Muffins
My healthy savoury muffins are of course gluten free and they are also free of any flour! Sprouted buckwheat and brown rice are blended with sweet and salty sundried tomatoes then baked to a fluffy perfection!
Pumpkin Seed Chocolate Candy
Just three ingredients to make this pumpkin seed candy that uses activated pumpkin seeds. I’m not a huge fan of the taste of pumpkin seeds but they are so nutritious I love them here as the chocolate enhances the flavour.
Kale and Sweet Potato Dahl
Lentils are one of the most sustainable foods you can have as they take very little to grow and add nutrients to the soil. This one pot dahl with kale and sweet potato is a great warming, complete and healthy dish.
CBD Infused Ginger Turmeric Sweets
A fun little sweet that’s made with cannabidiol (CBD) oil, ginger, turmeric and black pepper that may help to reduce pains and helps to reduce inflammation. Set using the seaweed extract agar agar.
Cashew Fruit Dip
Like a cashew cheesecake but in reverse! Perfect for any berries and it tastes so good no one would know it was dairy free and raw vegan.
I had a slow few months as I moved into my friends spare room to attend a course by FaceBook in London for creators that was part of their commitment to the EU about building communities. I had very low expectations, and it underdelivered on them.
Banana Caramel Chocolate Coins
I love just coating bananas in chocolate and freezing them to make a banana choc-ice coin. Banana just frozen gets a great texture. For this recipe I used some nut butter and sweetener in the middle to make it more indulgent.
Filmed during a heatwave on marble that had been baking for hours, so didn’t quite come out as I hope for, but you get the idea.
Quinoa Charcoal Pizza With Cashew Cheese
It never quite works out when I follow trends, this is my quinoa pizza with a black crust and a simple cashew cheese. The cashew cheese tastes great but doesn’t quite have the right look but wanted a simple just blend cheese for this.
Healthy Cookie Butter
This was a recipe I created in the blur of writing my first cookbook and an exclusive recipe. It didn’t quite turn out how I hoped as not super smooth but I always make for health first and it tasted good.
It took me until August to release it on the site, I was still recovering from the book – who would of thought that writing, editing, designing, publishing and photographing a 100+ recipe book all by yourself would be such hard work! I now know why teams of people are involved in a recipe book and only a fool would undertake it all by themselves, but glad I did it even if I’m still in recovery.
Quinoa Chocolate Banana Cookies
I’m a huge fan of soaking whole quinoa then blending and baking instead of using expensive quinoa flour. That’s exactly what this cookie uses and it’s sweetened just with banana. I did happen to over blend the batter while filming meaning the chocolate melted more than I would have liked, but still tasted great even if the chocolate chips were more melted in than planned for.
Smoked Cashew Mozzarella Cheese
This cheese uses tapioca starch to get a stringy texture and smoked paprika is added to give a smoked flavour without any smoking. Sadly this didn’t prove to be that popular but it’s still a great little recipe that I actaully prefer to my way more popular smoked cashew cheese.
Layered Quinoa Salad
This is based on an adaptation of a Deila Smith layered couscous salad although it’s been switched up to be dairy free with more nutritious quinoa and chickpeas. Was my attempt to jump onto the meal prep bandwaggon, I go through staged of liking meals prepped in the fridge and this works really well and is full of produce,
Seed Cheesecake Pots
So many people are vocal in the comments about wanting an oil free, nut free, syrup free dessert and this was my go at it. Sure it doesn’t look as good as seeds don’t blend as smooth as cashews.
I try to create new unique recipes rather than just reinventing the wheel. It didn’t get much love, maybe it was the look of it? Anyhow it tastes great!
3-Ingredient Pickle Cookies
The biggest flop of the year! On one hand you should never stop trying something new, but often I find out why something hasn’t ever been done before. At least I tried to be new and original.
2-Ingredient Peanut Chocolate Candy
Just bake some raw peanuts then stir some chocolate into the hot nuts. Sometimes I wonder how I manage to spend two days on such a simple recipe and write over 1000 words. It’s a great recipe though even if it is my third one of the year that looks like animal droppings!
By numbers this was the biggest flop of the year, but that could be a combination of Facebook algorithm and not the best opening three seconds of the video.
Chocolate Avocado Nut Pudding
Another little fun recipe with just three ingredients. I tried to make a chocolate looking version of an avocado but it possibly bombed as I decided to make it blender free so isn’t as smooth as it could be.
Chocolate Quinoa Banana Bread
Not strictly a 2018 recipe as was published right at the end of last year, but missed it into last years round up. It’s a great way to use up overripe bananas and sprouted quinoa is used instead of any flours.
I kept the recipe more on the bitter side of chocolate as it’s only sweetened with fruit so you might want to add some more sweetness depending on how sweet your bananas are. It was another recipe created to try to sell the book, the final photos I’m not that happy with but it is what it is.
Thanks for making it this far, I didn’t realise this article would be over 3000 words long. It’s been nice to reflect on the year of recipes and feel like I’ve actually done something. It can be so frustrating only delivering on a fraction of my ideas.
Let me know what you think of these recipes. What would you like me to do next? Which ones have you tried? See you soon in 2019 for even more plant based recipes!
Amazing recipes! Thank you!
Thanks Carol glad you liked these recipes!