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Chocolate Love Recipe (well sort of)

This is a loosey goosey recipe so be adventurous and use your intuition instead of relying on us to tell you amounts. Don't worry about messing this up!As always, we encourage you to use pure, organic ingredients, local whenever possible, and never hesitate to play with your food!
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Ingredients
  

Your Basic Chocolate Base

  • Unsweetened chocolate (chips, baking bars or bulk chunks), preferably organic and fair trade (slavery doesn’t taste good). If you need an amount, start with a cup, but it really doesn't matter.
  • Unrefined, whole food sweetener of your choice to taste: pure liquid stevia (we like Sweet Leaf), raw local honey and/or grade B maple syrup. Start with a spoonful, then add until it tastes right to you. With high quality chocolate, less can be more, but make sure you will enjoy it. We like to mix and match by adding a few drops of pure liquid stevia to give it a non-caloric sweetness boost before adding honey (our fave) or maple. The bitterness of cacao covers the slightly bitter aftertaste stevia can have, so they go well together.
  • Finely ground high mineral salt, just a pinch or so. It really makes the flavor pop and brings out the sweet so you don't have to overdo the sugar.
  • Optional: Vanilla extract

Fun optional things to add

  • Your favorite sprouted nuts or seeds, toasted even yummier
  • Shredded coconut, toasted is also amazing!
  • Pieces of unsweetened and unsulphured dried fruit (apricots, figs, dates, raisins, goji berries, mulberries, golden berries, etc.)
  • Delicious high quality flavorings: peppermint essential oil, orange essential oil, almond extract, spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, cardamom, chipotle, or try something obscure such as powdered hibiscus OR
  • To make amazing chocolate nut butter cups (trust us, you can figure this out!), your choice of nut/ seed butter, like almond, mac nut, pecan, sunflower (and peanut only if you can tolerate its aflatoxins, or mold toxins; Valenica peanuts are supposed to be better in this way)
  • To make chocolate dipped or covered fruit, use whatever seasonal fruit you like!

Instructions
 

  • Melt the chocolate using one of two methods (we highly encourage you use one of these methods instead of a microwave, which studies are now showing destroys nutrients and may otherwise harm us in ways traditional cooking heat does not)
  • Method 1: Double boiler - sounds fancy but it really just means you are using hot water to heat your pot so you don't heat the chocolate up too hot, too quickly and burn it onto the bottom of the pan. Find a metal/ glass bowl (or smaller pot) that fits nicely into a larger pot. Pour the chocolate (break it up first if using a baking bar). Pour some water into the larger pot, bring it to a simmer, and place the smaller bowl or pot with chocolate in the water bath. Be careful not to get water into the chocolate itself. Stir until melted and creamy! It's a great time to focus on your breath, relax and practice patience as well as savor the smell of warming chocolate. It's like getting a steamy chocolate facial. Yum!
  • Method 2: Toaster oven (this is the quick and easy way)- Put chocolate unsweetened chips or broken/ chopped up bar in a ceramic ramekin or tempered glass dish (like Pyrex container). Heat in the toaster oven, and, depending on how urgently you need chocolate, you can set it to 200 - 300 degrees F. Slower is probably safer to prevent it from seizing up. For example, if melting a cup of chips, let it go for about 15-20 minutes and then check on it, stir, and continue heating and stirring every 5 minutes or so until it is smooth and creamy (shouldn't take too long). Adjust time to volume, of course.
  • Once the unsweetened chocolate is totally melted, mix in the sweetener(s) of your choice and salt to taste. Remember that if you will be adding dried fruit or dipping fruit in the chocolate, you will need less sweetener.
  • Then, add any of you optional goodies. Go with your intuition on how much of each thing.
  • Now it’s time to shape it. This part is fun! You can pour it into any mould. Consider how you want your final product to be shaped. You can pour it into a container or casserole dish to cut or break into a bar-like effect. Ice cube trays work great for bon bons. You can order BPA free silicon molds online. We like the heart ones.
  • Make your own nut butter cups! Small paper baking cups (the ridged kind) work great for this. You can even buy silicone small baking cups for mini cupcakes and muffins that work great. For the filling, you just sweeten some (eyeball the amount) of your nut butter to taste and add a pinch of salt if unsalted. To assemble, pour a little of the basic (melted, sweetened, salted) chocolate into the bottom of the paper or silicone cup, add a little glob (this is the technical term) of nut butter and pour a little more melted chocolate over it to cover.
  • Dip fruit in it! Another use of the basic chocolate base is to dip fruit like bananas, strawberries or cherries in it. If you're in the tropics like us, when it's seasonal, dip mango or pineapple in it.
  • Make up your own chocolate treat! Get creative and play.
  • Whatever shapes or concoctions you made, put in the fridge or freezer (again freezer means you get to eat it sooner) until it sets. You can keep it refrigerated or not. It should be fine at a moderate room temperature. Just note it may melt if it gets too warm.