Years ago I used to belong to a Yahoo coconut oil group, where people would discuss the miraculous health benefits of coconut oil and ways of consuming more of it.

Coconut oil has been much maligned. It has since then been shown that research blaming heart disease on coconut oil was faulty. In fact, in countries where coconut oil is a major part of the diet, there is no more heart disease than in countries where it is hardly ever consumed.

The group is still there, though I had to check to see, it’s been so long. It is also pretty busy.

But getting back to the subject at hand, it was on that list that I first saw mention that you could whip coconut milk. I bought a can, chilled it, and whipped, but nothing happened.

There’s a need for a non-dairy whipped topping that isn’t all crap. There’s also a need for a vegan whipped topping, um, that isn’t all crap. Really, the only home recipe I saw for something like this was made by beating silken tofu with sweetening and pouring it over the dessert. The recipe poster admitted it was not as good as whipped cream. The only person who made the recipe gave it 1 star and called it the worst recipe she had ever made and a waste of tofu.

So imitation whipped cream can be bad.

If you’ve ever opened a can of coconut milk in cool weather, you’ve probably noticed that it looks like a big lump of fat with some liquid. I always assumed that it was mostly fat. But finally this week I was opening a can of coconut milk and noticed the nutrition facts. I asked myself how that compared to dairy cream.

Was I surprised! Canned coconut milk has only half the fat of dairy cream, about the same as coffee cream. No wonder it doesn’t whip. But the question is, could it whip if it was more concentrated?

So I took a can of coconut milk, warmed it up to make sure all the fat was melted, added 1/2 cup of dried coconut milk powder and 1/2 cup of sugar. After stirring for a while and leaving at room temperature to cool, I put it in the refrigerator, stirring every half hour until it was cold. I whipped it for a long time to get soft peaks, but it definitely was whipped. And grainy, in a cold coconut oil graininess kind of way. So it wasn’t great, but it was at least as good as a lot of non-dairy fakes. And it was natural.

Flash forward. The next time I added an entire cup of coconut milk powder.

I poured it in bowl of my electric mixer to chill, put that in the refrigerator, and put the beaters in the freezer. As the mixture cooled, it thickened like heavy cream, and was white like cream, rather than translucent like skim milk. I continued to whip it a few strokes every 15 minutes or so, until it was chilled. Then I put it onto the mixer, and WOW! In about 45 seconds I had perfectly stiff peaks of yummy coconutty whipped creamy goodnes. The texture and mouth feel are exactly like whipped heavy cream. Okay, it’s pretty coconutty, so it will probably go better with tropical fruit than temperate types. In fact, I would server this with pineapple, mangos, etc. to my friends who aren’t dairy-challenged. It is really that good.