Last week on a whim, I picked up a “personal” ice cream maker when we were shopping in Courtenay. The ever-so-tiny Rise by Dash makes exactly one pint of ice cream!

Of course, a pint of ice cream actually requires only one cup of fluid because the ice cream maker increases the volume with air. I used Jessica in the Kitchen’s recipe for vanilla vegan ice cream and we were both blown away with the result–it tastes like the richest dairy ice cream!

I decided to branch out a bit and make chocolate, so I halved the recipe and added three tablespoons of a nice quality cocoa to the mix.

The chocolate version is even better than the vanilla and tastes like a fudgsicle, so I thought I’d take a whack at making fudgsicles from the recipe. I also decided to make them a touch healthier by replacing the white sugar with medjool dates.

Vegan Fudgsicles

• 1/2 cup cashews soaked for ten minutes in boiling water and drained
• 1 can of coconut milk (do not use low-fat)
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 70 grams pitted medjool dates
• a dash of sea salt

Blend ingredients until completely smooth in the Vitamix or other high-speed blender.

Once smooth, pour into popsicle form. This should make six or seven fudgsicles.

Let freeze for at least four hours.

Delicious and relatively healthy!!

I say “relatively” because I recently discovered the Yuka app, which analyzes packaged and processed food and produces a score for each product between 1 and 100. The closer to 100, the better the food. As it turns out, cashews and dates both score well above 50 (the “good” range), but coconut milk scores only 9/100 (the “bad” range)!

The GOOD news is that Yuka rated two of my favourite foods at 100/100–Lotus Foods Millet and Brown Rice Ramen, Sprague Lentil & Vegetable Soup:

And my beloved Rao Marinara actually gets a pretty good score too!

And the song of the day is Gang of Youths’ “Why Does it Always Rain on Me” because it’s such a sweet, melodic song. I was emailing with Bob yesterday and he mentioned he had bought tickets to see Gang of Youths, but the Vancouver show was cancelled. Bob always has great music recs, so I promptly asked Google to play Gang of Youths and am quite taken with them!