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Chocolate Bark

Once you eat this chocolate bark you will not be able to buy a chocolate bar from the store anymore. This is so easy to make and you can’t really go wrong. You taste it as you go and you can make it exactly the way you want.

Basic ingredients:
½ cup cacao butter
½ cup cacao powder
Maple syrup to taste
Salt to taste

Optional ingredients: (one or a combination of)
Dry raisins
Dry cranberries
Pumpkin seeds
Sunflower seeds
Hemp seeds
Crushed nuts (almonds or walnuts or pecan)
Chili pepper (for a nice spicy chocolate)

Directions:
1. Place the cacao butter in a double boiler.
2. Once the cacao butter starts to melt, reduce the heat or even turn it off. You don’t want it to become hot, just melted. If it stops melting, raise the heat a little.
3. With the help of a sifter, slowly sprinkle the cacao powder on the melted cacao butter.
4. Mix the cacao butter and cacao powder together as you are sifting.
5. Add the maple syrup to the chocolate liquid and keep mixing.
6. Add salt.
7. Taste and adjust to the darkness, sweetness or salt amount to your liking.
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8. Place a parchment paper with the side raised in the bottom pan or Pyrex.
9. Uniformly sprinkle the dry fruits, nuts, and seeds in the bottom of the pan.
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10. Pour the melted chocolate mixture into the seeds and nuts.
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11. Place it in the refrigerator or freezer for 20 minutes or so. You can also sprinkle coarse salt, hemp seeds or sesame seeds on top for garnish.
12. Before it gets completely hard, you can cut into the preferred pieces sizes and place back in the refrigerator.
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Or once ready you can just break it by hand into pieces and enjoy.

The nice thing about using cacao butter is that your chocolate will not soften or melt when outside refrigerator, unlike coconut butter that melts with the temperature of your fingers and is very soft at room temperature.

Have fun and be creative.

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What do you know about cashews?

I was researching cashews to be able to share with you their benefits. What I found really surprised me.

I asked myself in the past “how do cashews grow?”, but I never really looked into it until today. In my searched I got on a site that was talking about the cashew apples and I got really curious. So I have decided to give you a quick overviews on where cashews come from.

The cashew tree called “Anacardium occidentale”. It is an evergreen tree that only grows in tropical country because it is very sensitive to frost. After its fourth years of growth it produces the cashew nuts and cashew apples. It can grow as high as 46 feet.

Anacardium occidentale tree

The cashew nut is often served as a snack or used in recipes like other nuts, although it is actually a seed. The cashew apple is a fruit, whose pulp can be processed into a sweet, astringent fruit drink or distilled into liqueur.

——- Cashew Flowers ———————- Cashew Seeds —————— Cashew Apples

The fruits are harvested carefully when ripe. The seed is removed and dried in the sun. In their raw form, the outer layer of the fruit contains multiple toxins—including anacardic acid, a powerful skin irritant similar to the toxin found in poison ivy—that must be removed prior to eating.

Roasting or steaming the cashews destroys the toxins, but it must be performed carefully because the smoke can irritate the lungs, sometimes to a life-threatening degree. When they are roasted, cashews change from their natural greenish-gray color to the light brown ‘nut’ sold in stores.

With that bit of knowledge, I have just learned that cashews can’t be fully raw, unless they are handled with extreme care (one by one) to remove the outer layer and then soaked in turmeric water to get rid of the left over poison.

Next time you crack open a tin of cashews, take a moment to appreciate the long journey those little c-shaped ‘nuts’ took from the tree to your table!