Let's eat: Healthy delicious macrobiotic sweets and desserts

Macrobiotic sweets: brownie, macerated fruits, matcha parfait and bancha

Love dessert but don’t love the fact that they could contribute to the waistline? Concerned about the amount of refined sugar that's in your dessert? Or you just want to find healthier alternatives to the conventional desserts?

I was answering yes to all of the above. That’s why I signed up for Soramame’s sweets class.

Soramame is all about macrobiotic diet and the classes are run by Keiko-san who is a very lovely, gentle and patient teacher. Having previously been to a number of her classes, I was already familiar with the concept of macrobiotic diet. It is a diet which focuses on grains and vegetables and without animal products. This means macrobiotic sweets are at least egg free and dairy free. In this class, the sweets were free from gluten, egg, dairy and refined sugar.

For a long time, I couldn’t get my head around sweets being “sugar free” and made without dairy. What are sweets and desserts that don’t contain butter and sugar? Wouldn’t they be just bland? Can you even call them sweets or desserts? What’s more is that if you don’t make sweets and desserts with sugar and butter, what would you use instead? I used to think these sweets and desserts would be complicated to make and required strange ingredients...

I discovered that sugar free refers to food free from refined sugars like white sugar, and they are replaced by things like maple syrup, rice syrup, stevia and so on. I thought it was good- at least they are sweet and not bland, but what about non dairy cream? This sounded very odd at first.

Non dairy cream is actually not as odd as it sounds, it can be made with coconut cream or even tofu for example which means you can probably eat just a little more!!

Also, chocolate can be substituted with cacao powder or carob powder. Carob powder is naturally sweet and less processed than chocolate and it was what we used in our delicious brownies.

Brownies made with carob powder- a healthier option than chocolate

So why did I want to try this vegan/macrobiotic sweets? Firstly, I was curious and secondly, I wanted to cut down refined sugars and fatty dairy cream because I personally believe it is a healthier option.

Keiko-san warmly welcomed us to her kitchen for the cooking class which was held around noon and I was very excited at the idea of eating sweets and desserts for lunch. Keiko-san had already setup our student preparation station where all the cutting, chopping and mixing were to occur to create our magical macrobiotic sweets luncheon.

Keiko-san used only organic ingredients which made the sweets and desserts that I was about to eat even better for the body.

Macerated fruits using organic seasonal fruits locally sourced

On the menu were macerated seasonal fruits with amakoji (yum), brownies topped with tofu cream (yum) and matcha parfait made with layers of rice puffs, jelly, adzuki beans and match cream (yum).

But before we ate the sweets, Keiko-san served us with miso soup (with miso that she made herself) and brown rice that she had already prepared and taught us how to make onigiri. Keiko-san also made simple pickles with carrots and daikon using her own label of shiokoji and bancha was also served.

いただきます！Itadakimasu!

Then we moved onto tasting our handcrafted healthy sweets! They were absolutely delicious and they were just as tasty as the conventional ones!

Matcha parfait with non diary match cream

As for making these at home? Definitely! The recipes Keiko-san provided were easy to follow and there were no strange ingredients at all, the main ingredients were tofu, rice syrup, maple syrup, agar agar and adzuki beans. Perhaps many of us are not familiar with carob powder, but like the other ingredients can all be bought easily in health food stores or even supermarkets around Sydney.

Keiko-san, thank you for the class and inspiring us to eat more healthily!

ありがとうございます！