Mmm cheesecake. It’s one of my favourite desserts. But as we know, the Brave New Meal cookbook is a vegan one which means this cheesecake is not made with cream cheese. This is made with cashews!

When soaked (and blended), cashews give such a nice creaminess to whatever you use them in – which was exactly the case with the cashew cheese sauce, used in several recipes (Beeteroni Pizza & Pear, Tempeh Sandwich).

For this sweet preparation though, the cashews are blended with quite an assortment of ingredients that all come together to create a super rich and creamy cheesecake filling. It is made with the soaked cashews, shredded coconut, brown rice syrup, coconut oil, lemon juice, rosewater and fresh strawberries. I made a couple substitutions however – I used corn syrup instead of brown rice syrup, and I used a mix of ground almonds and shredded coconut. I also omitted the rose water (and added an equal amount of water) so it was just a strawberry cheesecake.

The filling was quite tasty on its own, almost like a super thick yogurt, and I like how it had a pretty pink colour from all the berries. It was definitely on the sweeter side though and I’m not sure if that’s because corn syrup is sweeter than rice syrup. The cool thing about a cashew cheesecake is that the filling doesn’t need to be baked! It gets poured into the cooked graham crust and then just needs to chill in the fridge for a few hours (or overnight) to firm up.

I actually made my cheesecakes in muffin tins so they were cute individual ones instead of one large cake. They still took several hours to firm up but I was getting a bit impatient to try the first one and it was a little difficult to release it from the pan so definitely don’t rush the chilling time. The best texture came after them chilling for almost 24 hours. It was so creamy and I love the classic graham crust with it.

This was such a nice treat and would be perfect for a birthday or other party. I mean, who doesn’t like cheesecake?!