Simple Make-Your-Own Raw Chocolate: 3 Recipes for the Weekend

 

Raw Dark Vanutte Hearts, Flowers and Stars

A busy day today! Belatedly inspired to make some raw chocolate for Valentine’s Day, I devised not 1, not 2, but 3 recipes for different palates. They are very simple to make: once you’ve got the cacao butter melted and measured, it takes seconds to mix together and then all you need to do is pour and freeze.

For the first batch, we used the basic recipe on the back of The Raw Chocolate Company Cacao Powder & Coconut Palm Sugar then added a twist.

(We use their products because they are Organic, Raw, Fair Trade and Excellent Quality. Apart from the bars and cacao butter, most of their products come in Resealable Bags and the new packaging is Recyclable too!)

This version is very dark, coconut palm sugar is not like refined sugar, it is much more subtle. You may also want to grind it a little finer so that it blends more easily.

Remember, Raw Chocolate is very rich and you won’t eat as much at once as you would if it were commercial chocolate.

Note: As always, we tend to do things by eye and taste, so measurements are inevitably approximate.

First, cover a baking tray with greaseproof paper and have some small cookie shapes ready. Heat up some water to melt the cacao butter in a small bowl in order to measure it if it’s in a block or if it’s broken up into small pieces you can put it straight into the bowl with the cacao powder and coconut palm sugar.

Ingredients

90g Raw Cacao Butter

60g Raw Cacao Powder

60g Coconut Palm Sugar

1 Tsp Vanilla Extract

Approx 3 Tbsp Finely Chopped Raw Almonds (We actually forgot to measure. Just sprinkled them on!)

Method

Melt Cacao Butter and add to Cacao Powder and Coconut Palm Sugar in a bowl over a pan of hot but not boiling water.

Stir until sugar is dissolved and everything is thoroughly mixed and smooth. Add Vanilla Extract and stir in well.

Pour into moulds on parchment-lined tray or directly onto parchment. If the latter, roll the tray around to make the chocolate spread.

Sprinkle with chopped almonds and lightly press into mixture.

Freeze until hard.

Carefully press out of moulds or break up the flat chocolate into pieces. It is best left in the freezer until required. We portion them up so we can just take out the amount we need and the chocolate doesn’t start melting while you break it up or sort out how much you want.

Vanutte Chunks

 

Sweet Mulberry Raw Chocolate 

This second recipe is sweeter as it has raw maple syrup in, children might prefer it, although it is still dark.

As before, have some moulds ready on a parchment covered tray.

Ingredients

25mls Melted Raw Cacao Butter

15g Raw Cacao Powder

25mls Raw Maple Syrup

10g Cashew Pieces

10g Dried Mulberries, de-stalked and broken up

 Method

Mix together Cacao Butter, Maple Syrup and Cacao Powder in a bowl over a pan of hot but not boiling water until well blended.

Mix in Cashews and Mulberries and pour or spoon mixture into moulds, or pour mix into moulds and add nuts and mulberries on top – this will probably give you more shapes, we did it the first way and it made the mixture very thick.

It only made about 6 small shapes that were quite thick, so adjust amounts accordingly if you have a lot of chocolatey mouths to fill!

Freeze and store as before. (They are on the right of the photo below – we tried one first!)

Sweet ‘n’ Sour Raw Chocolate Chunks

Recipe Number 3 is also sweet and as there are so many different tastes in our family we thought we would cover all bases and add some sweet and sour dried fruit as well as the nuts to this one!

My husband loves raisins but the younger family members won’t eat them so he can have that row all to himself! I love dried Golden Berries, they have a sweetly tart flavour that I can’t resist, so there’s a row of those for me. In the middle are cashew pieces and dried mulberries.

Ingredients

30mls Melted Cacao Butter

30mls Raw Maple Syrup

20g Raw Cacao Powder

Handful of Raisins

Handful Golden Berries

 Handful of Cashew Pieces

 Method as before, but pour onto parchment in a tray and roll around to spread it out, then sprinkle the other ingredients in rows to cover the whole area and press in lightly.

Freeze and store as before. (We were able to keep the rows separate once solid by gently using a knife in a sawing motion and then breaking them up).

With all these recipes you can add different flavours. Some like mint, orange – even chilli!

Ps Here’s a whimsical music video By Death By Chocolate. Enjoy!

Copyright: Chris McGowan