Valentine’s Edition: Chocolate Made With Love (Vegan, Gluten Free)

Happy day of love, everyone 🙂 I hope your day is filled with love, laughter and quality time with your love ones. I know the world dedicates this day to love, but I think everyday should be filled love 🙂

If you are like me and like to make something to shower your loves ones with gifts, look no further. On Valentine’s, I typically cook a nice meal or bake a delicious cake but I refuse to go out to restaurants for meals as I feel it’s all too commercialised and they are just trying to create another occasion to charge customers higher prices for their normal dishes/meals!

This year I thought I would make something different – homemade chocolates as a gift rather than making a special meal or a cake! I usually make chocolate with coconut oil but I find the taste of the coconut over powering and hence, I don’t end up liking the chocolate I made.

So, this time when Aldi had their special buys and was selling cacao butter, I bought a packet. And I couldn’t wait to make my own chocolate with it. I also used cacao powder to give the chocolate-y taste but you can use cocoa powder. In terms of sweetener, I would recommend using any liquid sweetener that you like. I used date syrup as I bought it from my recent trip to Israel. I haven’t tried using sugar, but I think powdered sugar would work the best if you do not want your chocolate to have grainy texture of sugar. And I also added some dried fruit, roasted nuts and seeds for the topping. But you can add almost anything you like in your chocolate – think orange zest, cacao nibs, desiccated coconut, sea salt flakes, just to name a few.

So yes, I hope you enjoy this recipe as much as I have. As always, please let me know what you think of this recipe. If you like what you see on this blog, you can follow me on my blog, Facebook or Instagram for some food porn. Also, if you do recreate this recipe, don’t forget to tag me on Instagram @subz_foodie 🙂

Ingredients

1 cup cacao butter;
1 cup cacao powder/cocoa powder, sifted (make sure you sift this, otherwise you will get lumpy chocolate);
1/2 cup liquid sweetener of your choice or to taste (I used date syrup, but you can use maple syrup, honey, rice malt sugar, coconut syrup, molasses, agave);
Pinch of himalayan salt (or you can add other flavours like vanilla extract, orange extract, peppermint extract); and
**Optional toppings/inclusions of your choice – dried fruits, nuts, seeds, orange/lemon zest, desiccated coconut, rose petals, cacao nibs, sea salt flakes, etc.

Toppings/inclusions for the chocolate

Method

Melt the cacao butter on a double boiler or bowl on top of a small saucepan over medium heat. Make sure the water is not touching the bottom of the bowl;
When the cacao butter is completely melted, remove from the heat and add cacao powder and mix until well combined;
Allow to cool slightly, then add your sweetener of choice and salt (or flavour extract of your choice) and mix until well combined and smooth. Make sure you do not allow any water to into the chocolate mixture now. Also, if you would like your chocolate to have dried fruit and nuts, this is your chance, add them in (about a handful) and combined until your chocolate mixture is well incorporated;
Pour the chocolate into molds or hard pans to harden or even baking tray lined with parchment paper. I used silicone mini muffin and silicone bread loaf pans as it helps with removing the chocolate when it hardens later;
Now for the fun part, add your toppings of choice on the top of the chocolate mixture. Once you are happy with your chocolate toppings, place the pans in the fridge for 1-2 hours or allow to harden at room temperature for several hours;
Once your chocolate hardens, remove from the pans/trays;
Enjoy all by yourself or you can gift them to your loved ones. Stores in fridge for up to a month.