The Many Adventures of Dinnie the Pooh: 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.