Raw sweets

I'm going to tell you about the two cooking courses I recently attended at La cocina de Babette, that I mentioned in my previous post. I got to know this school via Ibán's blog (a well known amateur baker in the Spanish-speaking bread-baking blogosphere), when he announced that he would materialize in Madrid and would give his worshippers a course on festive breads (I believe this happened last november). That was something not to be missed, so there I went. There I met Bea, "chief" of the school, an artisan bread enthusiast and also of those less beaten tracks on cooking (please forgive my English, sometimes I don't seem to find the right words). Being that I was happy with the "bread experience" I decided to repeat it when Bea announced that they would give a course on "guiltless desserts" and another on "guiltless chocolate". It's already sometime since I'm trying to eliminate common sugar from the sweets I cook, though it's not always an easy task. Besides I hate to try and substitute another sweetener for sugar to end up with a non-edible mess and be forced to throw a large amount of food in the garbage. That's the reason why I experiment less than I should.

The courses were given by a very nice couple, Gabi & David, whose target was to teach us to prepare uncooked pies and chocolates, everything raw and hardly heated. In short, these guys are what is called raw vegans. The courses were very interesting, we prepared pie bases with nuts, dried fruit and coconut oil, cashew nut-based sweet sauces, pie fillings with sesame and carrot, we used agave syrup as the only sweetener, prepared an avocado-based chocolate mousse... well, uncommon and new uses for known foods and also foods I'd never tasted before, like carob flour. All the products they use are organic, because they advocate you should use the freshest and most natural produce, untreated and unprocessed, they even prefer untoasted cocoa! Undoubtedly this is the way to keep the nutrients in your food at its purest. Raw vegans defend that all food qualities are best taken advantage that way and that it's best for your health. I think this is difficult to refute, it sounds logical, doesn't it? Though that doesn't mean we like everything raw, we're definitely not educated for that. This movement asserts that this is the perfect diet for humans, the primitive diet followed when humankind lived in the forests and fed only on the Earth's produce, the only diet to which the human body is perfectly adapted regarding evolution.

I have no pictures of the sweets I brought home because I didn't manage to take a single decent photo at the school (the camera is a bit new for me and it's got a lot of personality of its own). Furthermore the little pies, chocolates and the like didn't last too long when I arrived back home... ahem. Even my eldest liked the avocado, buckwheat and carob flour truffles... If I'd told him what they were made of, he'd vomit. Kids... you've got to lie to them once in a while.

I guess you're wondering: What's the point of the peas picture here? Well, they are here because regarding peas I'm completely raw vegan: I love them raw, straight out of the pod like my mother taught me. If you try them, some good quality ones of course, you'll agree. Like eating Nature's little pills. Come on, what are you waiting for?