Canapés can be fiddly to put together but the impact of these cashew cheese stuffed penguins, all lined up to greet your guests, is sure to make people smile. You can make the component parts, including stuffing the prunes and adding the beaks to the olives, before people arrive, and keeping them in the fridge for a few hours, before assembling the penguins using a cocktail stick before guests arrive.  

Remember to leave a little dish out for your guests to discard their cocktail sticks.

INGREDIENTS

Makes 12

100g/ cashew nuts, soaked for at least 2 hours

1 tablespoons water

1 tablespoon lemon juice

1 tablespoon nutritional yeast

¼ teaspoon sea salt

½ teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon orange zest

1 carrot, peeled

12 prunes

12 black olives

cocktail sticks

METHOD

Rinse the cashew nuts under cold running water. In a small high-speed blender, such as a Blendtec twister jar or Vitamix, blend the soaked cashews with the water and lemon juice. Add the nutritional yeast and sea salt and blend again. Turn into a bowl and mix in the orange zest and ground cumin, ensuring it is well distributed. Transfer the mixture to a piping bag if you have one. 

Slice the carrots into disks and cut the feet into a web shape on one side, reserving the triangular cut offs for beaks. Make an incision lengthways in each of the prunes, checking each for pits and removing any you find. Widen the cavity in the prune so that you can stuff it with the cashew cumin cheese.

Make an incision into the side of each olive at about a third of the way from the bottom – about beak height. Slide the carrot beak (cut offs) into the incision you have made in the side of the olive.

Pipe in the cashew cheese mixture into the prune cavity. Put the cocktail stick through the prune body. Secure the disk feet to the prune body with the cocktail stick and secure the olive head on the other side.

Here I have positioned the penguins on a cucumber log. I roughly cut the cucumber in half, length ways – but you could use half a pineapple or half a melon instead.

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