In the end, after various mishaps, cooking errors, and reconsiderations… I baked some delicious vegan shortbread baskets with barley and tofu filling. 🙂

I hesitated a lot. It was the first time I cooked hulled barley, and the first time I used barley in a dessert, so I had plenty of valid reasons to hesitate.
But Flavia was thrilled with these little treats, she was about to binge on them! And she absolutely wants me to make them again soon.
In fact, just yesterday, I already bought more hulled barley and I’m getting ready to repeat the recipe to please her and to have one more for myself, since they all disappeared under my nose in no time!

And since I still have some currants in the fridge, I might as well take the opportunity to test a variation I have in mind right away. That way, if I have time to update you on the result, you might even find the variation written up before the recipe gets published!

In any case, make sure you don’t have plans for Monday at noon because that’s when all the Light and Tasty recipes go live. Ahhh but Monday at noon… it’s now! 😄

Well, I’m ready! Let me present my recipe for today’s Light and Tasty appointment, topic of the day: barley. About which I wrote a cooking tutorial just two days ago, so if you, like me, are just now starting to explore barley… soon it will have no secrets for you.

Try these vegan shortbread baskets with creamy tofu and barley filling right away!
You’ll discover that barley, especially hulled, fits wonderfully in sweets, and you’ll discover that vegan desserts are delicious, in case you didn’t already know. 😉

👇 More vegan sweet ideas:

vegan shortbread baskets with barley and tofu filling v

Difficulty: Medium
Cost: Medium
Rest time: 30 Minutes
Preparation time: 1 Hour
Portions: 18
Cooking methods: Stovetop, Oven
Cuisine: Italian
Seasonality: All seasons

Ingredients

1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 3/4 cups whole wheat flour
1/3 cup corn oil
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup water
2 1/2 tsps baking powder (vegan approved)
2 tsps orange zest (or lemon)
2 cups hulled barley (weighed cooked)
1 cup rice milk
1 cup tofu
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 tbsps potato starch
to taste currants (for decoration)

Tools

Pan
Chopper

Steps

The shortbread comes, with very few variations, directly from my already tested recipe that you find HERE. I only changed the proportions between the ingredients to get the right amount of shortbread for this recipe.
👉 You can use more whole wheat flour (even all, in which case the liquid part must be increased a bit).
👉 If you don’t have orange zest, you can use lemon zest. I used orange zest that I had frozen at the end of last orange season. Alternatively, powdered orange zest that you’ve dried, or candied orange zest that you surely have in your fridge as a backup. 😉
The first thing to do is cook the barley.
☝ Hulled barley needs pre-cooking soaking, so for more details on soaking and cooking barley, I recommend following the instructions I’ve written in the recent article dedicated to the basic cooking of this cereal.
After soaking (overnight) and an absorption cooking of 45-50 minutes, the barley will have absorbed all the water used for cooking (barley/water ratio of 1 to 3). Add rice milk, 1/3 cup of sugar, and orange zest to the barley (I also added a piece of lemon) and let it boil again until all the liquid is absorbed (more or less it is similar to the cooking process in milk of cooked wheat for the pastiera).
While the barley is cooking, prepare a tofu cream by proceeding in this simple way: blend the tofu pieces with 1/4 cup of sugar and 2 tablespoons of starch in a food processor. Blend well until smooth. If necessary, you can assist the processor by adding a tablespoon of rice milk.
When the barley is cooked, let it cool slightly, then mix in the tofu cream.
Divide the shortbread into 18 portions (they should be between 35 and 40 grams each).
Make each basket by placing each portion of dough into a silicone mold (or other preferred mold) and shaping the dough with your thumbs, as shown in the following photo:
Fill each mold with two teaspoons of the barley and tofu cream.
I made these baskets twice (in the end, what I hypothesized in the introduction happened!): the first time I decorated before baking, with an almond on top and then with fresh currants added after baking (cover photo). The second time I enriched the filling by adding currant berries both inside and on top of the mixture before baking.
Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 20 minutes. If the edge of the basket cooks too quickly, slightly lower the temperature and extend the baking time by 5 minutes to give the mixture a chance to set.
The mixture is soft while the filling remains hot, as it cools, it will set.
These vegan shortbread baskets filled with tofu and barley cream are really good, an excellent example of a vegan dessert that even non-vegans will love!
And it’s also a slightly sweet dessert, yet very delicious.
Good even when warm, I still recommend letting them cool to fully enjoy the meaning of the famous saying one leads to another 😀 but really, though!

Variations and Tips

Filling Variations: as already mentioned, you can add currants to the filling, or other small fruits like blueberries or raisins; toasted almonds or pine nuts are also great additions (although I haven’t had time to try the latter, but they inspire me). Another interesting variation is to replace the starch with coconut flour, perhaps adding some on top as decoration after baking.

Vegan Shortbread Variations: I tried replacing the whole wheat flour with buckwheat flour and was very satisfied (the photo of molding the basket with the hand is from the buckwheat variant).

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WW Propoints Info

For those interested in WW Propoints, the diet I’m following with great results, the point calculation for this recipe is 4.7 p. per treat (considering I got a total number of 18 pieces). Happy dieting to everyone 😉