It’s the old favourite in one of it’s infinite variations – banana and sesame:

I ground up maybe 80g of sesame seeds with 1 tablespoon of cacao nibs and a bit of vanilla pod. I mashed this up with a banana and and a teaspoon of mesquite and a teaspoon of hemp leaf green superfood.

The basics of the recipe are the ground sesame seeds (or tahini) and the banana. Any number of other things can be added, I often use spirulina but I fancied a changed today. If I want something really sweet I’ll mix in a bit of agave or carob powder.

I just made Golden Cream Pie, one of Holly‘s recipes. It was great, although not quite as good as when Holly makes it!

(Also, I didn’t have dried cherries, so I used fresh ones, which made the base not very base like!)

Pastry:
100g or ½ cup almonds, soaked
100g or ½ cup hazelnuts/ filberts, soaked and dehydrated if possible
5 dates, fresh if possible
5 prunes
1 banana
30g pitted dried cherries (if available)
handful cacao nibs

Filling:
hemp milk made with 200ml or 2/3 cup hemp seeds and juice of 2 oranges and water as necessary (click for hemp milk recipe)
a few pieces orange peel/zest
2 dried figs
½ banana
50g or ¼ cup macadamia nuts
30g or a handful goji berries

Decoration:
handful fresh cherries
sprinkling chocolate powder

Process all the pastry ingredients except the cacao nibs together until smooth, mix in the nibs and form the pastry base on a plate.

Blend the topping ingredients until smooth and fill the pie.  It will set in a few minutes
Sprinkle raw chocolate powder on the top and decorate with halved cherries.

I made myself a dehydrator:

Ok, not quite. I worked out how to dry stuff using my radiator! I’ve been using this method to melt my cacao butter for a while now, then started drying some orange peel for making the orange oil which then led me to try and dehydrate a cookie…

So I was experimenting with a recipe for a cake base and I thought “mmm, this would make a good choc chip cookie, so I added some currants and, there it is:

Ingredients:

• 60g almonds, soaked
• 6 dates, soaked
• 2 prunes, soaked
• 50g cacao nibs
• 1 tsp lucuma
• 1 tsp mesquite
• 1 tsp cacao powder
• 10g currants

I put everything except the currants into the food processor and processed until the texture was ‘cake like’ (took quite a while, kept having to stop and stir it up a bit). I then added the currants and processed briefly. I ate most of it as it was and dried one cookie for an hour or two, but I think if you have a dehydrator it might make good cookies. You might want to add more cacao powder, 1tsp doesn’t make them very chocolaty.

I love mulberries! When I was living in Spain, I lived about 5 minutes walk to a mulberry tree so when it was the season, I would go every day and pick and eat!

Taking a cue from the Vanoffe bar, which is a raw white chocolate bar, I decided to try my hand at dark chocolate with mulberries.

First, I ground up some very dry mulberries (if your mulberries are still a bit chewy, they may need dehydrating before you do this) with some vanilla pod. Then I melted about 40g of cacao butter and added:

• 4 tablespoons of the ground mulberries
• 3 tablespoons raw chocolate powder
• 1 tablespoon lucuma powder
• 1 teaspoon mesquite powder
• 1 teaspoon dark agave nectar

I left it in the fridge for a while until hard and it was very good. I think this recipe might work well with my mint oil when it is ready.

If you know me at all, you probably know that I hate supermarkets, but sometimes, like totday, I end up in one. I hadn’t been to get my wild greens and it was getting dark. If I want to buy organic greens, I have a choice, a two hour round trip on the underground to an independant health shop or a five minute walk to the supermarket. A 2 hour trip seems too much for 100g of greens, so the supermarket it was.

I picked up a bag of watercress, spinach and rocket salad and then somehow got drawn to the chocolate isle. I must have spent at least 10 minutes (maybe more) looking at all the posh chocolates, but amazingly I managed to leave without buying any of them and inspired!

Back home, out comes the cacao butter and another raw chocolate experiment begins. I grate 50 grams and start to melt it, and then stir in a teaspoon of dried mint leaves (stuff I bought for making mint tea). I thought it might work the same way as making tea, leave to infuse for 10 to 20 minutes as the cacao butter slowly melts.

Once the butter had melted, I added 4 tablespoons of cacao powder, 4 tablespoons of carob and 2 tablespoons of lucuma (I think, I might have lost count on some of those measurements). I tasted it, good chocolate but not very minty so in goes another teaspoon of mint, still not minty enough so in goes another. In the fridge to set:

and then the real taste test: good chocolate, but the mint thing didn’t work. I now understand why people use mint extract or mint oil, I shied away from that because I’ve looked at other things like orange oil and they always seem to have other unwanted ingredients. I will have to search for some really natural flavourings.

I made a delicious tomato sauce which I had with a simple salad of wild greens, some chopped musrooms, avocado and some unpasteurised cheese with wild garlic.

Here’s the recipe for the sauce:

• 2 fresh tomatoes
• 4 sun dried tomato halves, soaked for 3 hours
• 1 date, soaked for 3 hours
• 1 smallish red pepper
• 6 wild garlic leaves
• a small piece of fresh chili
• about a teaspoon of coriander seeds
• about a teaspoon of ground cumin

Put it all in the blender and blend!