Made with beautiful blue pea blossoms, this Butterfly Pea Cheesecake is a colorful twist on the popular summer dessert. Our vegan no-bake recipe is perfect when you need a make-ahead dessert that everyone will love!
This blue cheesecake is made with a crunchy cookie base and two layers of a dairy-free creamy filling, one white and one blue. It looks fancy, but is actually super easy to make.
For a base, you’ll need crumbled dry cookies, like digestive cookies, plus coconut oil to hold them together. The classic cheesecake uses melted butter, but coconut oil is a great non-dairy and vegan alternative.
For the filling, we replaced the traditional cream cheese and double cream with two clever ingredients: silken tofu and agar powder.
Silken tofu is a softer, creamier, and waterier version of regular tofu, perfect for vegan desserts. Plus, it’s low in fat and high in protein, which not only makes this bluepea cheesecake vegan, but also a lot healthier.
Agar powder is a vegetable gelling agent used in jellies and desserts, and can usually be found in the bakery section of the supermarket. It works like gelatin: you have to boil it to activate it, and then it solidifies as it cools in the fridge.
Make sure you measure the agar powder accurately with a scale. It is very strong: just a few grams are enough to thicken the cheesecake. If you want to use agar flakes or vegan gelatin, see our tips in the recipe below.
To make the cheesecake filling, you need to puree the silken tofu until creamy and cook it with agar for a few minutes. Then add the butterfly pea powder to the tofu cream and stir until perfectly blue.
The butterfly pea or blue pea is an exotic deep blue flower commonly found in Southeast Asia. Due to its high concentration of blue pigments, it is used in colorful desserts, drinks and many other dishes.
You can find butterfly peas as dried flowers or powder online or at your local Asian grocery store. The powder is also called “blue matcha” because the flavor of the butterfly pea flowers is slightly grassy, ​​earthy, and wheaty, similar to matcha but not as bitter.
For desserts like this cheesecake, we recommend using butterfly pea powder as it’s easy to incorporate into creams and batters.
If you want to use the flowers, you must first boil them in water or milk, like we did in this blue sticky rice or blue jelly dessert. For more usage tips, see the tips below.
You can make the whole cheesecake blue or give it a layered look like we did. Follow the steps below and we’ll show you how. When finished, top this super pretty Bluepea Cheesecake and serve with pride!
And if you want to try another exotic cheesecake flavor, try this no-bake durian cheesecake!