After scanning raw food websites, selecting the best bits of different recipes for raw food brownies and experimenting a lot with stuff that really doesn’t blend together very well, I decided on my final combination of ingredients.Then, I told one of my friends I was going to bring “special brownies” for a treat after dinner one evening. She was very excited indeed. However, she ended up being enormously disappointed when I turned up with these, not because they aren’t yummy, but because if you are expecting anything resembling a brownie, you would be disappointed too.
I therefore named these little treats Raw Chocolatey Slices, because that is a vague enough description for you not to have any preconceptions, but still contains the word “ chocolate” and should therefore be enticing.
Word of warning: due to the nut content, the calorie count on these is pretty high. They are an absolutely turbo-charged little snack though if enjoyed in moderation!
Ingredients
5-8 brazil nuts
10 medjool dates
25 g raw chocolate powder (can be a bit of a pain to find, look in health food shops. You can grind up cocoa nibs to make it but it is a massive effort. Whatever you do, do NOT think you can substitute this ingredient for either a) carob powder or b) drinking chocolate – both are wrong, wrong, wrong!)
Pinch of rock salt
Couple of tablespoons of water
1 tsp vanilla extract
- Grind up the walnuts as best you can, ideally you want to reduce them to a really crushed walnut mixture but if your blender won’t do this it isn’t too much of a problem, you’ll just have chunkier slices!
- Once the walnut is as ground up as possible, add a pinch of salt and the medjool dates and process the mixture until it forms a big sticky mess.
- Mix in the chocolate powder, the vanilla extract and the water until it forms a big, brown sticky mess.
- Try to finely slice the brazil nuts. If that is too much faff then just roughly chop them, but slices work nicely if you have the inclination. Fold the brazil nuts into the mixture.
- Press the whole mixture into a tray (7 inch cake tin works well, but anything small will do) so that it is somewhere between 1 and 2 inches thick.
- Cover, and refrigerate. The mix will be ready to cut into slices as soon as it is chilled and will keep for around a week in the fridge.
My goodness me Egg, you're becoming like Mrs Beeton! x
ReplyDeleteI am so trying that. I currently make 'museli type bar thingy' which is good, involves finely chopping raw nuts, adding whatever seeds and fruit I have around, some oats, also cinnamon, chopped peel, vanilla extract and that kind of stuff and then making a mix of blended dates, honey and water to hold it all together. Pack it into a tray really well for any hope that it will become a 'slice'. I usually bake it for 15 mins and then slice it up. I imagine it would work raw too. Charlie x
ReplyDeleteRaw food's the way to go!
ReplyDelete