Who knew raw chocolate was so easy to make?!

On Friday night, as I waited to collect Mountain Man from the train station, I had some time to kill so decided to try my hand at making raw chocolates.  I have never made them before, but always planned to.

I'm told that the bag of very expensive raw cacao butter in the baking cupboard has been there for 2 years.  I made lip balm, once...and then just kept meaning to make chocolate.  Another nutritional therapist friend of mine beat me to it last week and made her own, posting the recipe on facebook and inspiring me to give it a go (when I saw how simple it was).  So, I made some chocolates.  Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

If you're wondering why you'd bother making chocolate, when there are plenty of options in the shops, home made raw chocolate is different.  For a start, there's no soya or milk powder or other weird fillers in chocolate you make yourself (why is soya used in chocolate?)  Secondly, you can put whatever you want into them and have fun experimenting.  Thirdly, raw cacao is super rich in health giving nutrients as it has not been heated to the point where nutrients are damaged.  So those promises of chocolate being full of mood boosting chemicals, antioxidants, healthy fats and minerals are true, but more true with raw chocolate than the highly processed varieties we tend to see in the shops.

I have no doubt that what I made was pretty basic and master chocolatiers would laugh at my efforts, there are all sorts of clever things you can do to make it even more impressive.  However, as a first attempt, I'm pretty chuffed and they taste mighty fine if I do say so myself!

Ingredients:

60g raw cacao butter

60g raw cacao powder

40g coconut sugar, milled to a fine powder in a nut or coffee mill

Filling - I used

2 dsp pumpkin seeds, toasted and milled

3 dsp Super Life breakfast topping, also milled

To make:

Melt cacao butter in a glass bowl over a saucepan of simmering water (make sure the bowl doesn't sit in the water)

Once melted, add in the cacao powder & sugar

Mix thoroughly, then add whatever filling you fancy and keep mixing until it's smooth and gorgeous

Pour the mix into silicone sweet/chocolate moulds, or as I did onto a baking sheet (because I completely underestimated how many moulds I'd need)

Put the moulds into the fridge and ignore for at least an hour

Eat and rejoice at how good raw chocolate tastes.  YUM!

Decadence on a Monday

A jar of molasses does not travel well on it’s side. 

I know this now, but when I left Cork and packed it on it’s side, in my plastic box of baking ingredients, I didn’t.  

This was the result.  A gift really…on cleaning up the mess I discovered that quite a few packets of dried fruit were out of date and thankfully chucking them out saved me from cleaning molasses off their packets.  Narrow escape.  That task complete, I was inspired me to make something sweet.

I borrowed the recipe from Susan Jane White, a nutritionist in Ireland who creates the yummiest food, always keeping in mind food intolerances and sugar levels.  So the below recipe is a version of her Raw Cacao Brownies but doctored a bit, as I didn’t have everything specified in my dwindling box of goodies.  These are dead easy to make and full of nutrients – the nuts provide oodles of B Vitamins, Vitamin E, Calcium, Magnesium, Manganese, Iron, fiber & essential fats as well as tummy filling protein.  There's buckets of stress busting magnesium in the cacao powder and a lovely balance of electrolytes from the salt.  One of the beauties of this treat is that it doesn't have lots of refined flour, processed sugar and weird flavourings and preservatives as so many shop bought treats do.  As well as that, it is fit to bursting with goodness, usually removed from the raw ingredients used in chocolate or sweet offering in the shops.  A decadent treat that is actually good for you, wow!

What you’ll need:

½ cup of walnuts

½ cup of hazlenuts

Pinch of Himalayan Crystal Salt

2 tbsp maple syrup

1 dsp agave syrup

5 dates (soaked in water as they weren’t all that sticky)

4 tbsp raw cacao powder

1 tbsp normal unalkalised cocoa powder

50g or so of dark chocolate

Put everything except the dark chocolate in a blender or food processor and blitz until it starts to come together.  Susan Jane suggests you stop blitzing as soon as it starts to make a ball, otherwise you’ll overdo it.  I had to add the agave syrup, as it wasn’t coming together at all.  Perhaps due to my dates not being super sticky, so start without the agave and see how you get on.

Once the mix has come together, remove small lumps of the mix and roll into ping-pong sized balls between your hands.  You will get a bit messy, but you also get to lick your hands clean, so it’s worth it.

Poke a little hole in each ball and smoosh it together if it starts to fall apart.

Once that’s done melt the chocolate over a simmering bowl of water.  Once melted, put a small dollop of chocolate into each ball.  Susan Jane added probiotic yoghurt to the chocolate, but Mountain Man had finished off the yoghurt with breakfast, so I figured dark chocolate on it’s own would suffice.  Yum, it did…

If you have a little chocolate left over, as I did and some strawberries in the fridge, I’d suggest dipping the strawberries into the chocolate.  It would be a shame to waste it after all!