This year I'm trying my best to use all the seasonal products for my recipes. Especially, since my parents live in a village and have a great supply of seasonal vegetables and fruit. It is often even difficult to eat everything by ourselves so I am trying to save food and put as much of the seasonal goodies into my recipes as I can. ☀️
Now the season of cherries is coming to an end in Lithuania but I had so many of them that I managed to try out some recipes. 🍒
Today I am sharing a vegan chocolate cherry pie recipe with quite simple ingredients 🍫
This pie is not super sweet because of the cherries so it will work perfect for those who don't like the sweetest desserts.
Also, I used fresh cherries in the recipe and I advise you to do the same as I didn't try it with frozen cherries and I am not sure if it would turn out the same. But if you feel like experimenting - feel free to replace fresh cherries with some frozen ones! 🍒
In the recipe I used spelt flour (whole wheat flour) but it should work just as fine with plain all purpose flour. 🌾
Note: The pie was baked in a 20x20cm size baking tray.
You will need:
- 250 g. spelt (whole wheat) flour
- 140 g. brown sugar
- 1.5 tablespoons of raw cocoa powder without sugar (10-12 g.)
- 1 of teaspoon baking powder
- A pinch of salt
- 0.5 teaspoon of cinnamon
- 110 ml. melted coconut oil
- 190 ml. plant-based milk (I used soy)
- 2 tablespoons of fresh lemon juice
- 350 g. fresh pitted cherries
- Optional: ~2 tablespoons of chocolate chips
Preparation:
Start by preparing the cherries. Remove the cherry pits from each cherry. You can do that with a special device but if you don't have it, I used just a plain wooden skewer. Just take a cherry between your fingers and push the pit out with the wooden skewer.
If you have bigger cherries you can also use a straw or the tips from the icing decoration tool (I attached an example below).
Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius.
Mix all the dry ingredients (flour, sugar, cocoa, baking powder, salt, cinnamon and chocolate chips).
Mix all the wet ingredients separately (coconut oil, milk, lemon juice).
Put both mixtures (wet and dry ingredients) into one bowl and mix together.
Put baking paper into your baking tray.
Spread the dough evenly in the baking tray.
Place pitted cherries on top of it and press down a little with your hands. Cherries should cover the entire cake. If your cherries are large, you can cut them in half.
Bake the pie in the oven for about 35-40 minutes.
Once the pie is baked let it cool in room temperature for some time before eating.
You can easily eat it alone or sprinkle some icing sugar on top, add ice-cream or some other fresh fruit!
