Amy Leung shares her favourite recipes for festive vegan desserts, from pecan pie to chocolate mousse. Find your perfect treat to finish off your plant-based Christmas dinner.

There’s nothing like rounding off the end of a stressful university term with a holiday celebration! While this year has been a strange one, there’s always room for some festivities. Our flat Christmas meal took place on the 25th November and we got by with a handful of Christmas crackers, a homemade wreath, and a lot of Mariah Carey.

We cooked up some super easy vegetarian sausages and Quorn chicken with lots of veggies as seen above, and all sat on the floor to eat and blast Christmas music. But while our university kitchen may have been lovely, we still didn’t reach our full Christmas potential for the most important part of the meal, dessert! I asked around for what people would have made for the perfect end to the Christmas dinner with more time, money, and an oven that doesn’t switch off every ten minutes.

Vegan Chocolate Mousse

Ingredients:

250ml aquafaba (the liquid from a can of chickpeas)

A teaspoon of lemon/orange juice

250g dark chocolate (at least 70% cocoa)

Method:

1. Melt chocolate in a water bath/double boiler
2. In a separate bowl, combine aquafaba and lemon/orange juice and whisk until stiff peaks are formed
3. Fold the melted chocolate into the aquafaba mixture gently, you want to preserve as many of the air bubbles as possible!
4. Spoon mixture into ramekins/glasses
5. Refrigerate overnight until the mousse sets

Pecan Pie

Ingredients:

Premade pie crust (if you’re especially ambitious, you can make this yourself!)

250g pecan halves

200g white sugar

50g brown sugar

340g maple syrup

85g vegan butter

35g almond meal

A pinch of salt

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 180 degrees
2. Place pie crust into pan
3. In a bowl, whisk together the white sugar, brown sugar, maple syrup, salt, vegan butter and almond meal together
4. Pour mixture into pie crust evenly
5. Bake for 1 hour and 10 minutes or until centre is solid
6. Leave to cool for 5 minutes before eating

Note: Caramelised pecans make a wonderful topping for all manner of dishes from sweet potato mash to cookies!

About the author: Amy Leung is a first-year geography student at Oxford and is WILD’s Deputy Food and Drink Editor. She is especially interested in sustainable agriculture, plant-based diets, and being more eco-friendly at university.