Hello Readers !!
The Blogger mode is on today and I am here to share one of my most favorite recent creations. 🙂
We all love some Dark chocolate don’t we !? Dark chocolate is also one of the few safe options which is many a times vegan when you buy it off the shelf. My favorite combination with chocolates is roasted nuts. There aren’t very many vegan dark chocolates out here having nuts added. At least nothing very healthy. In Past I went to the extent of melting my dark chocolate and setting it into a bar with big rocks of roasted nuts in it. This time I wanted to do something a little bit more experimental and also hone the budding chocolatier in me 😀 .
Almond and chocolate is a match made in heaven. These are chocolates encasing a generous lump of almond butter. You might have guessed it, this recipe is not very cooking oriented but process oriented. As coating a butter with chocolate is not something I had done before ! But taste buds have a way of making you do crazy things and push your boundaries. This chocolate making actually got me thinking that I should do a course in chocolatiering. What I do here gives amazing results taste wise. It was my process of learning to make such a chocolate and probably it can be executed better. I know ill do it better next time 🙂 Nevertheless this bite of chocolate was just shockingly good and I really wanted to share it with you.
Unfiltered reaction of me eating the first piece of this chocolate.
I used Callebaut dark chocolate here which is a bakers pantry item. You could use any dark chocolate which is Vegan. Some brands I can think of Amul, Morde, Leonz. Amul would be the best in the three. Callebaut is a leading brand in chocolates and the taste says it all. I feel I should add a dark chocolate cake to my bakery menu after tasting its heavenliness. Having said that, it is sad there are very few brands of chocolate which are totally vegan and can be used in such recipes. I recently read Callebaut brand has banned Animal testing something that did not even occur to me a chocolate making brand would need to do. It was anyway a news I welcomed before making this blog post.
This chocolate was created with some very basic equiptment I have at home. I am sharing all the steps as I followed them with pictures.
Ingredients
150g Almonds
200g Callebaut Dark Chocolate (make sure whatever you use is vegan)
Equitment
OTG Oven / Cooking stove
Chocolate moulds
Toothpicks
cooking thermometer (not compulsory)
Steps
Prepare Almond Butter
- Roast 150g Almonds in OTG oven at 180 degrees for 8-12 minutes. Don’t use any oil while roasting. Midway through roasting move and turn around the almonds to get an even roast. Keep checking in-between as each oven heats up differently. Ideally in 12 minutes your nuts would be roasted.
- Cool the nuts
- In a dry grinder or food processor blend to make a butter out of this. Keep the butter coarse, grainy and pasty and do not grind all the way till it releases all oil and becomes liquid.
Setting the butter in moulds
As you can see in below picture, I tried to stuff the butter into a chocolate mould. I did this in hope of making heart shaped chocolates. But Callebaut is a very rich (cocoa butter) chocolate and never stuck on to maintain the shape. I would suggest you roll the butter in your hands into little balls like laddoos.
You can create multiple flavours at this point. I divided the butter into three parts to make three kinds of chocolates. In some mould I used slightly salted almond butter. In one I stuffed small raisons into the mould. and third was kept plain. You can be creative here.
Prick a toothpick into each of the mould sealing the butter around it.
Freeze the butter in moulds overnight.
Melting and coating the chocolates
- In a double boiler melt 200g of dark chocolate.
The ideal temperature to temper callebaut dark chocolate is around 34 c which is 93 F. You can use a cooking thermometer if you want to be precise. Else use your intuition. Dont wait till all of the chocolate melts in the bowl. Remove the bowl from over your boiler and keep on the counter. Gently fold melted chocolate over the non melted one until it all melts into a smooth liquid.
- Demould the butter gently. Using the toothpick dunk it into the melted chocolate and coat evenly from all sides. Use a spoon to help the process.
- Shake off the excess chocolate and keep standing upside down until it sets. You can see the DIY chocolate stand I made for this purpose 😀
- To fancy it up a bit , once the chocolate sets, you could use a piping bag filled with melted chocolate to create funky designs like I did.
- Keep the chocolate stand in a fridge.
- Once the chocolate is set well you can remove the toothpick and patch up the holes with additional chocolate.
This is the world’s best Vegan Chocolate. It vanished from my fridge before I could blink. And It wasn’t me who got to eat the larger portion 😐
As you can see the execution did not go as I planned. So if you are going to try this I would suggest you make butter balls. Freeze them, even if you do not use toothpick you can easily make chocolates perhaps a bit more rough around the edges. But who cares when you just made the world’s best Vegan chocolate 😀
Hope you had fun reading this. Try it! It is going to be worth the effort !
Love
The Vegan Birdie
THE VEGAN BIRDIE 