I obviously always love the opportunity to create something new and unique in the dessert department, so Kevin’s birthday coming up was an excellent opportunity to flex my creative muscle. I figured I should offer him the opportunity to challenge me to make him something crazy (or just tell me what kind of flavours he’d be looking for to help him ring in another year on the planet 🙂 …although honestly, I know him well enough to know that it would somehow involve chocolate and peanut butter)
Once said question was posed to the upcoming birthday boy, Kevin’s eyes lit up like a child on Christmas morning with all the possibilities. It took him all of 2 seconds to say “They have ice cream sandwiches, why are there no cheesecake sandwiches?” And thus this monstrosity was born.
The above question being my only parameters I thought I’d selfishly incorporate a few things I’d been wanting to try (namely, using our waffle maker for desserty things other than waffles) with flavours that I knew he would love (aka the previously mentioned chocolate and peanut butter).
I’m not against waffles however – in fact, far from it! What’s not to like about something that’s essentially cake, but filled with a million nooks and crannies that can be filled with an endless array of delicious possibilities?
On that note, the bottom layer here is a chocolate chip waffle using my go-to vegan waffle recipe. I can’t for the life of me remember where I got it, but it involves using orange juice and turns out perfectly every time. Next up is the peanut butter element. I made a cashew+vegan cream cheese peanut butter “cheesecake” layer which I liberally spread/piled on top of the waffle. I did a LOT of quality control for this part. A fair number of people would be eating it, so you have to make sure it’s up to snuff and won’t kill anyone right? That’s just good business 😉 . Next came making a deliciously fugey brownie, but cooking it in the waffle maker. Then I said to myself – what’s a brownie without ice cream? Those 2 things go hand in hand like…well, like brownies and ice cream. This stage was also super simple, I just bought some vanilla coconut bliss “ice cream” and then crushed and mixed in half a package of fudgeos (yeah for things that are accidentally vegan!) and spread that on top of the brownie layer. The top layer of the “sandwich”, another chocolate chip waffle. Finally, because there obviously wasn’t enough diabetes already infused into this dessert, I topped it with icing sugar and tried to add a slight health element with a little strawberry garnish (that counts as a serving of fruit right?).
Now this all sounds great, but the real question is, would Kevin like it? Considering that it got demolished and involved a lot of ecstatic eye-rolling and “nom nom nom” noises, I think I can safely call this one a successful endeavour.
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