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!

I’ve not been so creative in the kitchen for a long while. I got home tonight from Five Rhythm dancing and needed a snack, but as I need to be up reasonably early tommorow, I didn’t want to make chocolate. So I made something with cacao butter but no cacao powder.

• 30g cacao butter
• 2 tablespoons raw carob powder
• 1 tablespoon dark agave nectar
• 1 tablespoon ashwagandha powder
• about 5 tablespoons ground sesame seeds
• a little bit of vanilla pod, which I grated, but if I had thought earlier, I would have ground it with the sesame seeds

I think you know the method by now! Melt the cacao butter and add the rest of the ingredients, stirring all the time. Ashwagandha is a calming, relaxing herb – I want to go to sleep soon, my sleep/wake cycle is often a bit random, last night I stayed up till 5am and then took some ayahuasca and I didn’t get up until late, but I want to return to ‘normal’ for tomorrow.

On a completely unrelated note, my new favourite music which I’m listening to constantly is Maniko, the first track is my favourite, but they are all beautiful.

I just made some raw milk chocolate! It was ok, but I think the recipe needs a little bit more work. Also, I put it into the metal moulds but it didn’t set quite as firmly as the dark chocolate and therefore wouldn’t come out without a spoon! In future, I need to use the paper cases that peal off, it would have worked fine in those. (See my first raw chocolate post for a pic of the paper cases and how to melt the cacao butter if you’ve not done it before.)

Ingredients:

• 35g cacao butter
• 3 tablespoons cacao powder
• 1 tablespoon raw carob powder
• 1 tablespoon lucuma powder
• 1 tablespoon dark agave nectar
• about 50ml raw (unpasteurised) milk (I used organic goats milk)

Melt the cacao butter and stir in all the ingredients. I just added a couple of spoonfuls of powder at a time and stir it all in to make sure there are no lumps. Initially, the milk didn’t seem like it would mix, but a bit of stirring was all it needed. I put it into the moulds and put in the fridge to set.

Well, actually, I only put half into the moulds, I kept half back for more experimenting. To continue my sesame theme, I added 3 or 4 tablespoons of ground sesame seeds and another tablespoon of carob and mixed it all together. It became very thick, might be good for a topping for a cake. This tasted good, I think better than the first one.

I’ve been eating a lot of sesame seeds recently, my body must be in need of some nutrients found in them. So I tried making sesame chocolate and it worked really well (well I liked it and there’s none left now!) This chocolate is quite sweet, if you don’t like it too sweet then maybe use a little less of the sweetners (carob, lucuma or agave).
Ingredients:

• 45g cacao butter
• 3 tablespoons cacao powder
• 2 tablespoons carob powder
• 1 tablespoon lucuma powder
• 1 tablespoon dark agave nectar
• 4 tablespoons ground sesame seeds

First I melted the cacao butter (see my previous raw chocolate making post for details) and slowly stired in the ingredients. I added the ground sesame last, not sure if this makes a difference but if added earlier it might make it harder for the other ingredients to mix in well. And that’s about it. I put it into the moulds (more on those soon) and into the fridge to set. It wasn’t as smooth as some of the previous chocolate I’ve made due to the sesame still being quite coarse. It would be interesting to try with tahini, not sure if it work or not.

(I’ll be making raw chocolate as part of my workshop in London on Jan 27th…)

Made a delicious salad last night so I thought I’d share:

• 1 avocado, chopped
• 1 tomato, chopped
• 1/2 yellow pepper, grated
• 1/2 carrot, grated
• parmesan cheese, grated
• wild greens including wild garlic, chopped

• 30g sea spaghetti, soaked for 20 mins
• 2 tablespoons of flax oil
• 3 tablespoons sesame seeds

So, I mixed the first group of ingredients together. Then I ground the sesame seeds in the seed mill on my blender and mixed with the sea spaghetti, flax oil and some of the soak water from the sea spaghetti and then stirred this into the salad.

I was really in the mood for sesame seeds last night and had more in my desert. I attempted a halva recipe, I ground up 6 tablespoons of sesame seeds and mixed in a couple of tablespoons of dark raw agave nectar. It tasted ok, but it wasn’t halva! I’ve just started using agave and it’s amazing, sweet and syrupy, like nothing I’ve had raw before! I like to just spread it on bananas, I’ll have to be careful how quickly I’m getting through it.

If you have raw tahini, that would probably work better than the ground sesame in both recipes, I just don’t have any.

Today my chocolate pudding was particularly good, very creamy, so I thought I’d share what went in it:

• about 100g hemp seeds, soaked overnight
• dried fruit soaked overnight: small handful of goji berries and currents, 1 fig, 1 apricot, 1 prune
• 2 tablespoons of cacao nibs
• 3 tablespoons sesame seeds
• 1 tsp pollen grains
• 1 tsp coconut oil
  
• 1 tsp cacao powder
• 1/2 tsp maca powder
• 5 walnut halves
• 2 bananas

I’m not going to type out the method again, just look at one of my previous chocolate pudding posts, the only thing I did differently was that I ground up the cacao nibs, sesame seeds and walnuts on their own first (in my Vitamix Blender) before adding everything else.

Mmm, I just made the most delicious ‘milkshake’ ever. The ingredients were:

• approx 125g of coconut ‘meat’ (about half a brown coconut)
• 3 dates, soaked
• 1 tablespoon raw cacao powder
• 1 tsp lucuma powder

First I chopped the coconut meat up and put it into the blender with the soak water from the dates and more water to cover the coconut. I blended this up and then squeezed through a sprout bag to get a nice ‘milk’.

I then put this ‘milk’ back into the blender with the dates and cacao powder and whizzed it up. The lucuma was an unplanned addition, it wasn’t quite sweet enough so I added the lucuma which was perfect. Another option would be to add one more date, and something I’m going to try soon, no dates and more lucuma.

I made this last night with 4 tablespoons of cacao nibs instead of cacao powder. I put the nibs in the blender before the ‘milk’ and ground them up first, which resulted in an intensely delicious chocolate flavour, but it was very ‘bitty’ as the ground nibs were not fine enough to dissolve into the ‘milk’.