I quite like this frosting! I don't think either the flavour or the texture is nearly as good as non-vegan frosting, but it's still very nice. And I appreciate the simplicity of the recipe: just two ingredients and only maybe 10 minutes of active time and you have a declicious vegan-friendly chocolate frosting. You do have to plan ahead a bit, since it requires several hours of chilling before it's ready to use, but it's a very easy process overall.

ATK reported issues with separation when making this frosting with bar chocolate, so they recommended using chocolate chips instead. The stabilizers in the chocolate chips prevent the mixture from separating like it would with regular chocolate. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any chocolate chips that didn't contain milk ingredients. I looked at both dark and semi-sweet chocolate chips from three different brands and the ALL contained some form of dairy! So, in the end, I had to use bar chocolate. Luckily I didn't see any separation in my frosting. I think there may have been some stabilizers in my coconut cream, so perhaps that was enough to compensate for the lack of chocolate chips.

Vegan Chocolate Frosting

Slightly adapted from The Perfect Cake by America's Test Kitchen

Ingredients

• 400mL coconut cream¹
• 575g dark chocolate chips²

Directions

1. Combine the coconut cream and chocolate and heat, stirring occasionally, until chocolate is completely melted and mixture is smooth.
2. Press plastic wrap into the surface of the icing and chill in fridge until mixture is the consistency of cream cheese (2-3 hours), stirring halfway through.
3. Transfer to a stand mixer and beat with whisk attachment until light and mousse-like (2-4 minutes).

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¹ The original recipe calls for chilling 3 cans of coconut milk for a day or more in order to get the cream to separate out. You can then skim the cream off the top and discard the residual milk. This approach works fine, but I actually happened to have a tin of coconut cream in the fridge, so I just used that. It saves a lot of time and effort and means that you're not wasting the residual coconut milk. The original recipe only called for 1 1/2 c. of coconut cream (~360mL), but I had a 400mL can, so I just used the whole thing and added a little bit more chocolate to compensate. ^Back
2 Check the ingredients to make sure your chocolate chips are vegan. If you can't find vegan chocolate chips, you can try using bar chocolate instead (with the same diligence in checking for added dairy), just be aware that your frosting may be prone to separation without the stabilizers from the chocolate chips. ^Back