Raw chocolate cupcakes

Sometimes you just want to have chocolate with chocolate and perhaps some chocolate on the side. If that’s you right now, then you’re in luck as this recipe is exactly for that occasion! No faffing around with berries and bananas, this one tastes of pure chocolate. Fortunately everything in this recipe is healthy, so unless you decide to devour all of them by yourself in one day, they should do you no harm.

Raw chocolate cupcakes

(Makes 6-7 medium cupcakes.)

Cupcake base:
60 g dates
50 g almonds
40 g almond meal (either just flour or pulp from making almond milk)
25 g coconut flour
3 tbsp cacao powder
0.5 tbsp pure vanilla powder
some coconut oil + almond milk (the latter can be replaced with water if needed)

Blend the almonds and dates until they form small crumbs. Then add all other ingredients with about 1 tbsp of coconut oil and as much almond milk (or water) as is needed to blend everything into a slightly moist crumbly mixture. If you just made almond milk and are now using wet meal from that, you probably won’t need any milk. Don’t go for the same texture as you get in muffin dough – remember, these are raw cakes! So no need to make the dough overly sticky or liquid, it’s ready as long as it stays together with a bit of pushing. So get a spoon and squish a bit of the mixture against the side of the blender – if it sticks together, it’s done!

Now grab muffin forms and distribute the mixture between 7-8 of them. I always make one more than the recipe suggests so the frosting to base ratio is higher. It makes the cupcakes so much “juicier” to eat! After distributing, push the mixture down with a spoon and place the cupcake bases in the freezer while you make the frosting. The freezer step is not compulsory, but it does make it easier to get the cakes out of the forms!

Chocolate frosting:
3 ripe avocadoes
3 tbsp cacao powder
2 tbsp honey (or agave syrup for a vegan option)

Peel and chop your avocadoes, then blend them with cacao powder and sweetener. You can probably get by with two avocadoes if you don’t want mountains of frosting. As it happens, I do want mountains, so I made a bigger portion. I even had some left over to mix with my goat milk ice cream later! (Yes, goat dairy is the only kind I can have. I’m getting used to the taste :))

You may want to use a hand blender for making the frosting. I tried in my trusty blender, but it kept leaving green chunks and that’s definitely not what you want in a chocolate frosting. So I scooped everything out (just like last time) and used a hand blender, it made the frosting nice and shiny. When you’re done, spoon it into a piping bag. Have none? You can just spoon the mixture on the cupcakes for a different look.

Pipe the frosting on the cupcakes and decorate as desired. I used cacao nibs for some extra chocolate. One cupcake got special silver decorations as well, since this one went to my grandma for her birthday. She asked everyone not to bring anything, so I was a rebel and brought a tiny cake just for her. After all, could you say “no” to a birthday cake like this?

Homemade almond-coconut butter with vanilla and honey

I may have just come up with the best thing in the world. Seriously, it’s so tasty that I was struggling with spooning the nut butter into a jar – half of it miraculously disappeared on its way there. Who am I kidding – a big portion went missing during making the butter already, not to mention when it was actually done and ready to be stored.

Since my almond butter turned out well, but I forgot to put any sweeteners or other flavours in it, I decided to go for something more dessert-y this time. And boy was that a good idea! I do love the taste of pure almond butter, but sometimes you just need something sweet. And this hit the sweet spot so perfectly that I had to share the recipe with you now, even though I had two-three other things in queue before this.

Almond-coconut butter with vanilla and honey

150 g / 250 ml almonds
60 g / 150 ml coconut flakes
1 tbsp honey (replace it with a liquid sweetener if you want vegan nut butter)
1 tbsp coconut oil
0.25 tsp pure vanilla powder

Gather all the ingredients and perhaps a book (you’ll be in the kitchen for a while). If you’re not bothered with keeping the butter raw, you can make the process a bit easier for your blender and roast the almonds first. Put them on an oven tray with baking paper and roast them at 130°C (266°F) for about 15 minutes. Then let them cool for five minutes so they are not piping hot anymore, but not cold either. The heat will help the blender to get the oils out of almonds.

Almonds and coconut flakes go in the blender / food processor now. I used the highest and second highest speeds and blasted the nuts into flour. It already started smelling amazing at that step! But trust me, it will get SO much better as you continue.

If you continue processing the flour for long enough it will start clumping at some point. Study this photo and remember what it looks like, because you’ll be staring at this wet-sand-like mixture in your blender for a while. Process for a few minutes, stop the machine, scrape the mixture down from the sides (and break bigger pieces apart), restart the machine. This is why I recommended grabbing a book to entertain you.

Whoop, getting there! This is a step that I was stuck with for a longer time as well. It looks quite good already, but it refuses to transform to the next level for quite a while. Don’t give up though, just keep stopping and scraping and blending. I promise there will be magic happening at some point! By the way, don’t let your blender overheat – give it a break if you start smelling something that is not the delicious nut butter aroma coming from the blender. It’s probably your poor machine letting you know it will die if you don’t let it rest for a bit.

YES! Finally! It’s nut butter! If you don’t want to add anything, I’d recommend blending it for a bit longer so it’s even creamier. For this recipe’s purpose though, it’s ideal since we’ll have to continue for a bit after adding the last ingredients. Now you add vanilla powder, honey and coconut oil. If you happen to be vegan, this is where you replace honey with a liquid sweetener of choice. I can imagine this being super-delicious with maple syrup as well. And I guess agave syrup would also do the job, though the taste would be rather different.

Blend everything for a bit longer and you’ll end up with this creamy piece of paradise. Seriously, it’s THAT good. If you’re capable of restraining yourself, spoon this into a jar so you can use some later as well. If you’re like me, you’ll probably end up accidentally eating half of it there and then, making food noises all the way. (That’s what my bf calls the rather embarassing noises I tend to make when eating food that is too good to exist. Also called my crème brûlée noises.)

You can keep this at room temperature as it will probably not have any time to go off anyway – it will get devoured in two days tops! I managed to put a bit aside for a friend and stored that in the fridge so it’s out of sight. If you do that, you’ll have to take it out a bit before you want to start eating, since coconut oil will make it rather solid in the cold.

Now what are you waiting for? Go make this nut butter and tell me how it worked out for you! I want to know whether others would love this divine spread as much as I do. Omnomnom!

Homemade spiced almond milk

Switching from dairy to nut milks does not go easily for everyone. I bought every almond milk I could find in the shops and struggled with finishing the packages – they were all either too sweet or just weird tasting. I refused to give up though and in the end decided to make my own almond milk. And lo and behold! It was tasty! It does really help if you can make it entirely to your own liking, adding only the things you want. Goodbye store-bought milk, hello homemade deliciousness!

100 g almonds (dried weight)
500 ml cold water
flavourings to your liking (I used a bit of Himalayan salt, cinnamon and vanilla)
sweetener (I used coconut palm sugar)
/ If you want plain almond milk, use only almonds and water /

This recipe makes about half a litre of milk. If you want more, just double or triple the amounts!

The making of the milk starts on the previous evening – put your almonds to soak with some water. This makes them nice and soft and also gets rid of some dirt on them. You can see the dark circle just above the water, that’s dried gunk from almonds. If you’re in a hurry, you can shorten the soaking time to six hours or so, but I do really recommend doing it overnight. Properly soaked almonds give a nicer result.

When your almonds are nice and plump from soaking, rinse them and throw that old water away. Almonds and the half-litre of fresh cold water go in your blender now. Process them at high speed for around 20 seconds. I did mine for longer and ended up with that lovely foam. You can either sneakily eat it or let it disappear. Now you can take a break and read a bit or go check your Facebook or whatever. Leave the almonds to steep for 10 minutes so the milk can suck up more flavour.

Now grab your cheesecloth or some other thick fabric that can be used to squeeze liquid out from the almond pulp. Mine is massive, because I was silly and bought a straining bag from the wine-making section in the supermarket (what, your supermarket doesn’t have one?). I did not expect it to be that huge! The ends actually extend underneath the big bowl in the photo. Oh well, I have a DIY-project waiting now – visit mum to use her sewing machine, cut the bag in two (or maybe even four?) pieces and sew them into smaller bags. Then I could even give some out in “make your own almond milk” kits to friends and family!

Anyway, put the bag over a bowl or a pitcher and pour your mixture in it. And I mean pour everything in it, you’ll have to get all that damp pulp out from the blender. Then just grab the straining bag and start squeezing liquid out. Take it as your morning exercise! My hands were actually hurting after this.

Once all the squeezing is done, it’s time for flavourings! You can of course enjoy it as it is, but I decided to make it into more of a dessert drink. I sweetened the milk a bit with coconut palm sugar, added some oomph with pink Himalayan salt (only a little bit though!) and then went wild with cinnamon and vanilla. Since I can’t handle cane sugar, I couldn’t of course use that widely available vanilla sugar that pretty much everyone has at home. Fortunately I found this amazing jar of powdered vanilla bean during my trip to Finland.
PS. Sorry for the horrible photo, I was getting used to a new lense and managed to screw up the focus a bit.

Add all desired flavourings and stir. If you wish, you can end your quest for almond milk here and now. If you want to have a slightly creamier version though, read on! I stumbled upon this wonderful tip in the One Ingredient Chef blog, you can turn your almond milk with watery consistence into something that is actually creamy! Apparently if you warm up the almond milk, it turns creamy at one point. If you’re not aiming for raw milk, this can be a good step to add to your milk-making process.

To see a longer explanation of making creamy almond milk, just click the link in the previous paragraph. Short version: divide your almond milk into two parts and heat one of them in a pot (constantly stirring) until the magic happens and your milk turns from watery to creamy. Then mix it with the half you put aside before and voilà! Why the dividing? Because sometimes the heating can give you a super-thick consistency that is not really milky anymore. Then you can thin it out with the watery stuff.

And there you have it. Homemade almond milk with some spices. By the way, don’t throw the almond pulp away! You can dry it out and use it as flour in some other recipe. Or perhaps mix in some maple syrup and have a supertasty and filling treat. Don’t try to make almond butter with it though – I was silly enough to try and it just doesn’t work even after roasting it dry in the oven. There’s just not enough oils left in that pulp to turn it into butter. Anyway, I roasted my pulp dry and turned it into cupcakes – click to find the recipe!

Homemade Almond Butter

Making desserts is tricky if you’re not allowed to use eggs, sugar, wheat flour nor any dairy products. Fortunately I have already found some alternatives, but a lot of them require “nut butter of your choice”. Since my only allowed nuts for now are almonds, it wasn’t too difficult to choose what to make. My first attempt had quite nice results, so I invited a friend over to make another batch together – I wanted her to witness the magic of turning just plain nuts into something so wonderfully creamy. Unfortunately I missed one step and ended up with kind of damp crumbs that refused to turn into butter. I tried again today and fortunately everything worked like a charm!

So, gather your nuts of choice (you really don’t have to make almond butter if you’re a fan of hazelnuts for example) and get ready for this one-ingredient recipe!

I took a cup of almonds and decided to add a small handful of sunflower seeds just because I can. Take whichever nuts you prefer and then prepare a baking pan for a short roasting. Put some baking paper on the pan, spread the nuts and/or seeds and put them in the oven for about 12-15 minutes at 130°C (266°F).

You can stir them once or twice if they start getting too brown on top. I shook them around once, just in case. Once they’re out of the oven, give them five minutes to cool down. Don’t stretch the wait much longer than that!

Plop the slightly cooled nuts in a blender (or a food processor). They should not burn your hands anymore, but also not be entirely cool yet. Them being a bit warm really helps the process along. When I screwed up the previous attempt, roasting was the step I skipped. Unfortunately my blender cannot handle making nut butter without that step. Also, the blender has to be kind of powerful to handle processing nuts without overheating like mad. I alternated between highest and second highest speeds.

Very quickly, the nuts should turn into dry powder. Congratulations, the first step is done! Peek in and enjoy the smell of roasted nuts. Also, grab your rubber spatula or some other nice utensil and push the crumbs down a bit. There’s no use in processing them if half the nuts are climbing up the walls. You’ll probably have to stop, push the mixture down and restart a lot of times, if your food processor works similarly to mine.

Keep on processing and your nut crumbs should soon start clumping up a little bit. See those tiny balls of crumbs on top? That is very good, keep on going. Take care of your blender / food processor though, don’t let it overheat! It’s completely normal for the bowl to feel warm, you did put things from the oven in it and the blender is warming them a bit as well. It is not good however if the rest of the machine starts feeling heated and/or there’s a burning smell in the air. Just give your machine a bit of a rest and then continue.

Getting to this step will take time, but in about 7-8 minutes from when I started, the crumbly mess started looking like this. That means the processor is finally getting some oils out of the nuts.

At some point I started pouring/scraping the mixture out of my blender to break the bigger pieces apart and shake it around a bit. Otherwise the more damp crumbs kept gathering on the bottom and getting oils whipped out of them while the rest stayed dry on top. This step may not be necessary a different machine, but for mine it really helped.

This is the part where I started to get really excited. It’s looking like nut butter! It’s all damp and the processor is actually swirling it all around instead of keeping the oilier parts on the bottom and shoving dry crumbs up. This is not the end yet though, keep on going!

THIS is where you can stop. It’s all wonderfully liquid and the blender keeps pulsing half the mixture up the walls in splashes. If you wish to add any flavour, do it now. I wanted to add a bit of sea salt and perhaps a little bit of sweetener (maple syrup or agave syrup, since I’m not allowed to have cane sugar). Unfortunately I was way too excited that everything turned out the way I wanted it to, so I completely forgot about that step. I just scooped everything into a jar and danced around with joy.

And there you have it. Beautiful homemade almond butter. I can guarantee you that this is better than what you could buy in a shop – you know exactly what is in it and you can flavour it however you wish. Want vanilla butter? Chuck in some powdered vanilla bean! Want a chocolatey one? Add cocoa powder! Need it to be sweeter? Bring out your awesome syrups (or just use sugar if that’s what you like). Go ahead and give it a go! (And let me know how it worked for you :))