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 tabelspoons 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.
Ps We’ve got chocolate moulds in the shop now.
you can make your own mint oil by taking a bottle of light flavored oil (hemp or grapeseed maybe) and putting mit leaves in the bottle to infuse for days or weeks depending on how minty you want. It will also work with dried orange peels.
Thank you! I’ve made flavoured oils before (with rosemary, thyme, garlic, that kind of thing) but that was a long time ago and I’d forgotton about that possibility.
I’ll buy some oil to use today…