Gluten Free Me

Welcome back to the blog! This week’s blog is all about homemade chocolate! It sounds hard, but if you have a food processor, it does all the work for you.

Long story short, I bought 2 pounds of cocoa nibs on Amazon, thinking they were dairy free chocolate pieces – I was wrong. They were super tart, hard pieces of cocoa instead. If you keep them in this form, they go great with the Trader Joe’s acai bowls. But, if you can’t figure out how to use the whole two pounds, homemade chocolate is the way to go.

I have to warn you, this random recipe I found on google did not warn me that this chocolate would NOT taste like real chocolate – probably because there was no milk. As a result, the chocolate is a little drier than you might expect. With that being said, if you throw them into your favorite chocolate chip cookie recipe, you can’t tell the difference!

Recipe:

The measurements depend on the percent you are looking for. I did 70% chocolate and 30% sugar (your two ingredients) and it made a great dark chocolate mix. Depending on the total amount you want ( I did 500 mL in a Pyrex) you take that percentage. EX: 70% of 500 is 350. Then, you add 150 sugar. The steps are simple: You put everything into a food processor or a blender and keep mixing it until it turns into a liquid. Then, let it cool. The reasoning is that the movement creates heat, and slowly melts the cocoa nibs.

Once you have your cooled chocolate, chop it up and substitute it in any cookie recipe, or use it as a topping! I recommend letting it cool in a rather shallow container because it is nearly impossible to cut when it is thick, trust me. One other note: if you sprinkle some coarse sea salt over the chocolate before it cools, it tastes amazing. Happy baking!

-Nicole