Adapted from: http://www.healthysupplies.co.uk/raw-white-chocolates-snow-blossoms.html
I found
this recipe on the website ‘healthy supplies’, which is where I buy all my
freeze-dried fruit and various other exciting things. They call these
chocolates ‘Snow blossoms’, which is beautiful if a little pretentious, but too
similar to my fennel and pink pepper white chocolates, which really did
look like blossom on a tree. These little things are definitely stunning – my
rubbish phone photo doesn’t really do them justice.
I don’t
really think that eating an entirely raw diet is the most necessary or
practical of choices – we evolved to eat cooked food a very very long time ago.
BUT, on the subject of chocolate, and a lot of other dessert-y things, it is a
very good idea.
I love
chocolate, both eating it and messing about with it, but raw chocolate
is something else entirely. It is intense, sometimes bitter, and known to cause
the occasional ‘braingasm’. It also contains no dairy, rubbish e-numbers,
strange preservatives, or refined sugar. When I am on my period, I have found
that one little Booja Booja Raspberry Ecuadorian Truffle has the same effect as
about 200g of Cadburys Dairy Milk.
These
chocolates are not bitter at all as they contain only cacao butter, not cacao
powder. I’m not usually a ‘heart-shaped’ kind of person, being far too cynical.
But the heart shaped silicone chocolate moulds where the cheapest to buy on
Amazon, and so the raw white chocolate raspberry heart was born.
This
mixture made exactly enough to fill my 15-heart chocolate mould
Ingredients:
50g Cacao Butter, grated. Cacao butter is magical stuff – after
grating it I didn’t know whether or not to wash my hands or rub the buttery
residue into them! You can buy it online or in health food shops.
50g finely ground unroasted cashews. Grind them
using a food processor, coffee grinder or mortar and pestle.
2 tbsp agave syrup (use a little more or a little
less, depending on how sweet you want them to be).
2 tsp Lucuma Powder. Lucuma is a Peruvian
‘superfood’, which tastes a little bit like cookie. You can buy it online or in
health food shops.
1 tsp vanilla extract (I didn’t use this because I
don’t like vanilla, it would make them taste much more like white chocolate
though)
approx 10g freeze-dried
raspberry powder, or with another freeze-dried fruit powder.
Method:
Make sure
that your mould is completely dry. Use a teaspoon, or the tip of the handle of
a teaspoon to put a tiny amount of the raspberry powder in each heart of the
mould – I tried to keep the raspberry in one side, for aesthetic reasons. And
then accidentally knocked it with my elbow so it went everywhere.
Melt the Cacao Butter in a heatproof bowl placed
into a saucepan of simmering water - make sure the water does not touch the
base of the bowl.
Once melted, remove the bowl from the heat – it can
help if you put a tea towel between the bowl and your work-surface. Add the
lucuma powder, agave syrup, vanilla extract if using and ground cashews nuts
and stir well.
Now pour or spoon the white chocolate mix carefully
into each of the hearts. Once you have finished tap the sides to help any
trapped air bubbles rise to the surface. Set aside to cool on a flat surface or
in the freezer – these chocolates will take longer to solidify than dark raw
chocolates because of the high proportion of Cacao Butter.
Store them in an airtight container somewhere cool
or in the fridge.
These look really professional and I'm sure taste good too. I like the flavour of raw chocolate, but haven't tried a white chocolate version before.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much :) interestingly I found that the people who don't traditionally like white chocolate (like me) loved them, and those who normally like white chocolate weren't that keen. I think it is probably because I made them much less sweet.
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