Gardeners' Holidays 2019: Raspberry Fest

This year, once again, the star player in our June garden is the raspberries. They are ripening so fast we have to go out and pick them pretty much every day, rain or shine, to keep them from rotting on the canes. Here's today's take: about a cup and a half, bringing our total for the season so far to around 13 cups. And the bushes aren't even halfway done yet.

All this bounty of raspberries inspired us to try another raspberry fool, the fabulous dessert recipe we discovered last year. However, since we've been trying to reduce the amount of dairy we consume, we decided to attempt it with this vegan whipped cream alternative that I found on "The Kitchenthusiast," a blog run by KitchenAid. Most vegan whip recipes call for either coconut cream—which we'd tried before, and we simply couldn't get it to whip—or aquafaba (bean water), which whips up nice and light, but won't hold its shape. This recipe uses a combination of the two, so my hope was that it would produce a whip that was reasonably fluffy, but also stable enough to fold into a fool.

Well, this was not so much a fail as a complete fiasco. Maybe the problem was that we weren't able to follow the instructions exactly to the letter, since we already had some homemade aquafaba in the freezer and elected to use that, rather than draining off the liquid from a can of chickpeas, cooking it down, mixing it with regular-strength aquafaba, and then whipping it. But that didn't seem to be such a big problem; our homemade stuff whipped up just like it usually does, especially with the addition of a bit of cream of tartar, as the recipe suggested. Maybe it wasn't quite as stiff as the stuff shown on the blog, but it looked like it would be workable.

But when he got to the next step—adding in the chilled, drained coconut cream—it was a complete mess. Fresh out of the fridge, the coconut cream was almost completely solid, impossible to whip. Moreover, when he added it to the bowl, it somehow seemed to completely break the surface tension of the whipped aquafaba, turning it back into liquid. So what we ended up with was just a bowl of viscous liquid with globs of solid floating in it. When he attempted to introduce the beaters to it, all they did was spray aquafaba all over the place, while the globs of coconut cream clung to the beaters and didn't whip up at all.

So, we ended up buying a carton of regular old cow-based whipping cream and making our fool from that. (And since it was a one-pint container, we still have half of it left, so we'll have to do it at least once more.)

Brian did later some further experiments with both the aquafaba and the coconut cream to see if either of them could produce a reasonable whip on its own. This time, he couldn't get the aquafaba to whip up at all; it just stayed stubbornly liquid. As for the coconut cream, when he tried bringing it back to room temperature before whipping it (so it was thick, but not completely solid), he was able to whip it up to a kind of mayonnaise consistency, but it was nowhere near as light and fluffy as whipped cream ought to be.

So, for the time being, we're going to have to stick with real cream for our fool. The only other homemade alternative I've been able to find online is this recipe, made with almond milk, cooking oil (because it needs extra fat to hold its shape), and xanthan gum as a thickener. We do have some xanthan gum on hand, having bought some once to use in a homemade Frappuccino recipe, so maybe it's worth giving this one a try at some point, but I'll admit my hopes aren't high. Based on the picture, it appears to have more of a sort of custardy texture than the cloud-like texture I expect from real whipped cream.

Fortunately, we've got plenty of raspberries, so if we blow some on this experiment, it's not a disaster. And if we attempt the whipped cream and it seems like it's just not going to work at all, the raspberries are also quite good eaten plain.