Homemade vegan Vienetta – no-churn ice cream cake with thin crispy chocolate layers

I will never forget the first time I tasted Vienetta. I was born in 1979 so I grew up in the 80’s when the ice cream revolution happened. There were only three different kinds of store bought card bard boxed ice cream available. In the world. To my knowledge. It was vanilla, ‘rainbow’ ice cream, and nougat. And then came the Vienetta. We were sitting in my sisters room with yellow, blue and gray dots on the walls. I don’t recall the occation, but it must have been something big for my parents to actually buy a Vienetta. Come to think of it, it might even have been some guests who brought it. Anyways, the packaging, the unwrapping, the curled ice cream, the crispy thin layers of chocolate, it was beyond this world.

How the homemade Viennetta is made

1. Whip cream
2. Whip aquafaba with sugar
3. Mix the two
4. Layer with chocolate
5. Freeze
6. Decorate

Making the thin Vienetta-y chocolate layers

In Denmark we have a thing called pålægschokolade pronounced [ˈpʌ.lɛɡ.ɕo.ɡo.læː.ð̩]. And aparantly it translates to ‘sandwich chocolate thins’ or ‘Dark Chocolate Topping’ or similar. It is big, wafer thin flakes/plates (?) of crisp, dark (or milk) chocolate. It’s usually eaten on buns or rye bread preferably with butter under. It’s sort of our equivalent of Nutella. And they are perfect for our Vienetta recipe! I’ve used it in the Vienetta pictured in this post. And it is definetly the easiest way to get your chocolate layers. But since I’m pretty sure we are the only country that has it, I have included a couple of alternative options for you:

♥ Buy pålægschokolade

If you are keen on trying the palaegschokolade, the kind I use (from the brand Tom’s) is vegan. It happens to be exported to all over the world through online shops that sell Scandinavian or Danish food:

• UK: ScandiKitchen
• New Zealand: Safka – Continental goodies
• US: Nordic expat shop, Scandinavian Butik, Nordisk Import
• Australia: Danish Nordic
• Europe/Scandinavia: Scandishop, Danish Global, Coolstuff
• Arabia: Desertcart
• Denmark: Every. Supermarket. Anywhere.

Disclaimer: I have no experience with either of the above mentioned shops (nor do I make money from your purchase. I personally like to check Trustpilot beforehand to asess credibility).

♥ Use magic shell or liquid chococlate

“But Nina, how am I ever going to be able to pour it into those perfectly flat, thin layers of chocolate?” Good news – and bad: You don’t have to! And you probably can’t 😉 Luckily, perfection is not a necessity for success in this recipe. Anything that resembles thin layers of ice cold crispy chocolate will satisfy your taste buds. So don’t panic up front – you can do this! See image below the recipe. You can simply use store bought magic shell* or melt chocolate and spread it as thinly as you can in between ice cream layers.

*magic shell is chocolate that is liquid at room temperature but solidifies when frozen.

OR

♥ Make your own sandwich chocolate thins

This requires you to correctly temper a batch of dark chocolate and spreading it out thinly on either baking paper bakers acetate or the like with a spatula. If you don’t temper it properly it might be difficult to handle it after it hardens (if it hardens). Note that your homemade Vienetta doesn’t care how well your chocolate is tempered. The cold will make sure that the chocolate is hardened and makes a good *crunch* no matter how it got there … I couldn’t find one recipe that described exactly what we are looking for. But here’s a little inspiration: Making thin decorative shapes with tempered chocolate, and a little more more info on the temperering part with correct temperatures for different types of chocolate.

Decorating your vegan Vienetta

The most important thing of course being the folded-ice-cream-lookalike waves on each side. For the Vienetta noobs asking why this is important, please watch the video in the bottom of the blog post. If you are just gobbling down this sucker yourself you could skip it. But if you want it to radiate ✨🌟VIENETTA🌟✨and truly impress your guests, you know you need it.

♥ Whipped cream waves

In a narrow jar, I simply whipped 1/3C + 1tbsp (1 dl) whipping cream very stiff almost to the point of being lumpy. Then I sprayed it on with a petal nozzle (∼1cm or 1/3 inch wide) (see image below), wide side facing the ice cream. It was my first attempt, and it went very quickly, since I didn’t know if it would melt. So don’t be discouraged if you think it looks hard. Look closer, it is nowhere near perfect! You pipe it on just before serving. If you freeze it after decorating, it will taste somewhat crystallized. Neither a catastrophe nor a pleasure to eat. So if you don’t have the option to decorate right before serving, this as an option.

♥ Top decoration

Besides the whipped cream I decorated my Vienetta with what you see here:

• A sugary chocolate powder mix that I sifted on top
• Chocolate flakes made by scraping a chocolate bar with a potato peeler
• Frozen berries
• Whatever edible (or at least non-poisonous) flowers you have acces to.

What sugar to use in the Viennetta recipe

I prefer to grind my light brown cane sugar and a coffee grinder and that way making my own icing /powdered sugar. I tried making the ice cream with regular granulated sugar (which is white, small but not pulverized crystals that are bigger than caster sugar crystals). The problem with using this size of sugar grains is that you have to whip the aquafaba a very long time for the sugar to dissolve. This results in a very fluffy almost stiff meringue that makes for a very light and not very dense ice cream. So I recommend powdered sugar. Caster sugar might very well work, but we don’t have it readily available in Denmark, so I haven’t tried it myself. If you try it, pay attention to the consistency of the meringue and please let me know in the comments how it went 🙂 To learn the differences in the sugars I’m talking about, go to THIS elaborate, illustrated sugar explaining post.

The aquafaba

I used aquafaba from chickpeas in the recipe and there is not a hint of beans left in the final Vienetta. If you are afraid to have a beany taste, you can always go for a lighter bean such as lima, butter bean, white beans etc.. They generally taste less beany. If you have a fairly gooey aquafaba there is no need to reduce it. As mentioned earlier you don’t want the meringue to become too stiff or fluffy. So don’t worry about needing perfect, thick aquafaba. The consistency you get from canned beans is perfectly fine. If making your own, you might want to reduce it if it’s very watery.

The Vienetta loaf pan – size and lining

For reference my loaf pan (used in the pictures) meassures 2.75″ x 8.75″ (7 x 22cm) in the bottom and 4″ x 9.75″ (10 x 25cm) at the top. The height is 3.15″ (8cm). It is a silicone mold so if you are on a desserted island and can’t get wax paper, you could get away with not lining it. But the paper definetly gives your final Viennetta ice cream a prettier surface. And you are guaranteed that bits of ice cream wont break off when you remove it from the pan. If not using a silicone pan, you definetly need the wax paper. I used one piece of paper going across the sides and over the bottom. And two small seperate pieces that are just covering the ends. The paper is neatly folded, to better stay in place so it dosn’t move around too much when adding the ice cream mass.

3 – 2- 1 – go vegan Vienetta!

Here’s the recipe made using liquid chocolate. It was my first attempt and I didn’t cover the edges (at all) as described in the recipe. So a big part of the chocolate went straight to the bottom and settled there as you can see (I know, booh hooh, a big fat chunk of chocolate that you just HAVE to eat …). But the mouth feel of the other thin layers was very Vienetta-y!

“Ehrm … what IS Vienetta?”

For those of you who don’t know what Vienetta is: Here’s a video showing how Vienetta is produced. Bare in mind, if you already know Vienetta, watching this it is a bit like finding out (spoiler alert) that Santa doesn’t exist. I don’t know how I imagined it being made, but certainly not like this: