When you follow a raw vegan diet, you can have your dessert and eat it too! Although the raw vegan diet can seem like a limiting eating experience, you can enjoy numerous recipes that surprise and excite your taste buds. You can’t make every classic recipe that you know and love, but there are many raw renditions like this ice cream recipe.

In order to achieve a creamy base, you need to blend up frozen bananas. That means that you need to have a strong, high-speed blender, or a food processor to blend the ingredients thoroughly. You don’t want chunks of bananas in your bite of ice cream, so make sure to blend until you achieve a smooth consistency. This can take a couple minutes, but it’s ultimately worth it. The raw cashew butter, which you can purchase in a variety of grocery stores, contributes to the creamy texture. You then have to blend the caramel separately

This isn’t caramel in the traditional sense; rather, it’s date caramel. It’s more akin to date syrup, which you make by blending dates with some homemade almond milk (click here for recipe), sea salt, and alcohol-free vanilla extract. It’s integral that you soak the dates in water for about 30 minutes prior to blending to help soften them. This makes the blending process much easier. You only mix in the date caramel right before you serve the nice cream, otherwise it will harden and be unpleasant to eat if you freeze it.