Raw cashew butter fudge cups (gluten free)

Allow 300 g of raw cashews and a powerful food processor — a simple smoothie blender will not do. Blend them on their own, with no oil and no water, scraping down the sides every two minutes. The mixture goes through three successive states: powder, then a compact ball that seems stuck, and finally a smooth cream. It is that ball stage that puts people off: it lasts two to three minutes, and you simply have to keep going. Allow eight to twelve minutes in total. Salt at the end if you wish. The butter keeps for a month in the fridge, in a sealed jar.

Yes, with no harm at all to the product — and in some cases it is actually useful. Coconut oil is stable and keeps very well at room temperature, away from light, for twelve to eighteen months. Putting it in the cold simply makes it harden: it becomes compact and hard to scoop. The real gain is in raw cooking, when you want to speed up the setting of a preparation, as here. For everyday use, keep it in the cupboard: you will avoid having to soften it every time.

Around 24 °C, with a transition range between 20 and 25 °C depending on quality and refining. It is a rare case among plant oils: most stay liquid at room temperature, whereas coconut oil is made up mainly of saturated medium-chain fatty acids, whose melting point is higher. In practice this means it changes state with the seasons, which signals nothing abnormal. And in raw cooking it is precisely this property that makes it useful: it acts as a setting agent in the cold, where another oil would never firm up.