Cooking
Butterfly Pea Cheesecake (Vegan, No Bake)
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Made with beautiful blue pea flowers, this butterfly pea cheesecake is a colourful variation of the beloved summer dessert. Our no-bake, vegan recipe is perfect when you need a make-ahead dessert that will please everyone!
This blue cheesecake consists of a crunchy biscuit base and two layers of a dairy-free creamy filling, one white and one blue. It looks fancy, but it’s actually super easy to make.
As for the base, you’ll need crumbled dry cookies, like Digestive biscuits, plus coconut oil to hold them together. The classic cheesecake uses melted butter, but coconut oil is a great dairy-free and vegan alternative.
As for the filling, we replaced the traditional cream cheese and double cream with two clever ingredients: silken tofu and agar powder.
Silken tofu is a softer, creamier, and watery version of regular tofu, perfect for vegan desserts. In addition, it’s low in fats and high in proteins, making this blue pea cheesecake not only vegan but also much healthier.
Agar powder is a plant-based gelling agent used in jellies and desserts and is usually found in the supermarket’s baking section. It works like gelatine: you have to cook it to activate it, and then it will solidify in the fridge as it cools down.
Make sure you measure agar powder accurately with a scale. It’s very strong: just a few grams are enough to thicken the cheesecake. If you want to use agar flakes or vegan gelatine, check our tips in the recipe below.
To make the cheesecake filling, you need to blend silken tofu until creamy and cook it with agar for a few minutes. Then, tip the butterfly pea powder into the tofu cream and stir until it’s perfectly blue.
The butterfly pea, or blue pea, is an exotic deep blue flower commonly found in Southeast Asia. Because of its high concentration of blue pigments, it’s used for colourful desserts, drinks, and many other dishes.
You can find butterfly pea as dried flowers or powder online or at your local Asian food store. The powder is also called “blue matcha”, as the taste of butterfly pea flowers is slightly grassy, earthy, and wheaty, similar to matcha but not as bitter.
For desserts like this cheesecake, we recommend using butterfly pea powder as it’s easy to incorporate into creams and batters.
If you want to use the flowers, you have to boil them in water or milk first, as we did in this blue sticky rice dessert or blue jelly. You’ll find more tips on how to use them in the tips below.
You can make the whole cheesecake blue or give it a layered look as we did. Follow the steps below, and we’ll show you how to do it. Once ready, garnish this super pretty blue pea cheesecake and serve it with pride!
And if you want to try another exotic cheesecake flavour, give this no-bake durian cheesecake a go!
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