That time I made coconutty chocolate

This day has been a long time coming as I have spent the last few months trawling though supermarkets, markets and health food shops alike in the quest to find one key ingredient: coconut milk powder.

When making chocolate at home my preferred method is to use ground cacao liquor. This raw ingredient, often also called cacao mass is the direct result of grinding down the cacao nibs and thus contains raw cacao powder and raw cacao butter. The raw cacao (unlike processed cocoa) contains an abundance of minerals and health benefits such as:

Cacao is also a good source of both sulphur and magnesium, probably why we women crave chocolate during our periods!

Rather than having me preach on at you about the benefits of eating raw cacao take a look here for a more in depth look at this superfood. Now dont tell me that chocolate is not good for me

To make dark chocolate we would require to grind our liquor, conch and temper before putting into moulds to set. Yes it really is that simple! Yet I find that dark chocolate is sometimes too rich and bitter for some people (absolute poppycock if you ask me as plain/dark chocolate is pretty much just pure chocolate and what is the point of eating chocolate at all if you are just going to pile on extra ingredients and dilute the flavour.)  well each to their own.

For making milk chocolate do not just add milk as this will change the consistency and increase the fat content instead you should use milk powder. I had a look to see what the dairy free options for raw chocolate were ( personally I eat dairy but my sister and mother would rather substitute dairy in their diets) and well let's just say there wasn't exactly that much option if you wanted a dairy free milk chocolate bar and if there was it didn't taste all that great. I therefore decided to make my own with coconut milk hence the quest to find coconut milk powder.

The first thing you want to is to grind your cube of cocoa liquor into powdered form.

 Now comes the maths bit.

I have 37g of cacao liquor and will be wanting the same quantity of the milk powder.

37 +37=74

74g=100g right?

Well not quite as to make the chocolate more palatable I needed to add sugar and fat. I therefore worked from the equation:74/80 x 100 = x

This would mean that 100% would be 92.5g and subsequently that my sugar and fat content would be 18.5g therefore 9.25g each…well 9g getting into decimals of sugar is quite hard.

Ok maths over you can come back now.

The next stage on our homemade chocolate challenge is to conch our chocolate. I do not however have a large conching machine that you see at most chocolatiers but I have found that a heated up pestle and mortar does the trick nicely.

Heat your pestle or is it the mortar? The bowl bit anyway in the oven for about 20 minutes. I put the stick bit in as well and ended up having the conch with an oven cloth wrapped around both the pestle and mortar. Not ideal.

Put in all the cacao and grind for about two minutes before removing, adding coconut oil and truvia (sugar from the stevia root)  and replacing into the bowl for more grinding. Conching your chocolate helps to purify acidic compounds and improve the flavour so there are no guidelines for how long to conch your chocolate.

Once happy with your now smooth melted chocolate add the milk powder gradually. I started to panic at this stage as my chocolate looked to be clumping and was similar in texture to burnt chocolate. Luckily I learnt that the milk powder that I was using was just quite coarse and it was this that was affecting the chocolate and I hadn't in fact burnt anything. Panic over.

Temper the chocolate. There a few ways you can do this including a process called 'seeding' for this you melt your chocolate and then stir in commercial chocolate. Yet this would 'contaminate' the chocolate you had made so I prefer the 'tabling' method:

 Pour out the chocolate onto a flat, smooth surface such as marble or a non porous chopping board. With a pastry slice work the melted chocolate quickly around the board. The reason that we temper chocolate is to stop it from solidifying in an unstable form, through tempering solid fat crystals have more of chance to form from its molecules meaning that we end up with a chocolate with a better shine but also longer shelf life.

Place your chocolate in a mould and sprinkle on roasted cashew nuts (optional) before placing your chocolate to set in the fridge for about an hour.

Date, Apricot and Chia seed cake

Things are about to get experimental in the kitchen once more as we are going to embark making a fat free, (refined) sugar free, eggless, gluten free cake. This cake would be suitable for coeliacs,  lactose intolerance, vegans, vegetarians and also everyone else who fancies trying something different (like me) however I would advise you to steer clear of this recipe if you have a nut allergy.

For this recipe (that I just made up this morning) you will need:

1 cup of pitted dates
1 cup of dried apricots
3tbsp chia seeds
12tbsp water
100g walnuts
150g ground almonds
150g sultanas
1tsp baking powder
2tbsp agave nectar

Place the dates and apricots in cups and soak in water for 30 minutes

I read somewhere (here actually) that hydrated chia seeds can used in recipes as a substitute for eggs. Using the ratio 1 part chia to 3 parts water this soluble fibre will form a thick gel.1/4 cup of hydrated chia seeds equals approximately 1 egg.

Ok so with all the scientificy bit out of the way let's carry on with our recipe. Place 3 tablespoons of chia seeds in a cup and add 9-12 tablespoons of cold water. Leave to stand for 15 minutes and you will notice a thick gel beginning to form.

Grind your walnuts and combine in a mixing bowl with the ground almonds. Add the ground apricots, (I left mine quite chunky to add texture) dates, sultanas,agave nectar and baking powder to help the cake to rise in the oven (my baking powder is gluten free)

Combine all the ingredients and transfer the mixture to a greased loaf tin or muffin cases if you prefer. Bake in the oven at 180 degrees Celsius. The muffins will take around 22-25 mins whereas the loaf will need about 40 mins. A good test to see if the cake is done is to insert a skewer into the centre and if it comes out clean the cake is done.

This cake (if I can even call it a cake I mean it contains no flour, butter,sugar or eggs so what even is it?) is not all together that sweet, add more agave or honey for more sweetness so would go well with some jam and tea. On another side note as there is very little raising agent in this cake it will not rise very much (if at all) so it will be quite dense instead of light and airy as can be expected from normal cakes.

Chocolate and date brownies

I'm not sure why I keep baking 'free from' things, I mean I'm not intolerant of any ingredients but it seems to keep happening and today I made flourless (gluten free) chocolate and date brownies.  I based my recipe on this jaimeoliver.com one http://www.jamieoliver.com/news-and-features/features/purely-fruit-sweetened-brownies/ yet I made mine slightly differently

Ingredients

200g dark chocolate
200g pitted dates
1/2 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
2 tbsp coconut oil
1 tsp vanilla extract
100g chopped nuts (optional)
1tsp honey (optional)

The first thing on the list is to soak the pitted dates (and make sure that they are in fact pitted because nobody wants stones in their brownies) to do this place the dates in a cup of water for about half an hour. This allows the dates to swell up and absorb the water. It also makes grinding them down easier.

I used my Bamix (shameless plugging right there) to grind my dates but you can just whack then into the food processor and get the same results. 

Once you are happy with the texture of the dates move on to the chocolate. The JamieOliver.com recipe suggests that you also grind the chocolate yet I disagree so I melted it over a Bain Marie 

Once melted add the baking powder, vanilla and coconut oil. If like me you own coconut oil in a bottle it is very hard to get out as the oil is solid at room temperature. To get around this I placed the bottle in the pan of hot water (the heat was switched off) and watched as the oil melted.

Once the mixture has cooled I ground down some walnuts, almonds and hazelnuts until they were in small pieces yet still large enough to add a crunchy texture to the brownies . Add the nuts, honey and eggs before transferring to a greased baking tray and bake for 25-30 minutes at 180 degrees Celsius.

Even with the addition of a little honey these brownies are not very sweet and would therefore go very well with ice cream or a nice cup of tea.