Food
Vegan Chocolate!
115g Coconut Oil or Coconut Butter
150g Icing Sugar or about 75g of Stevia or other plant based liquid sugar (use Maple syrup or Icing sugar for low FODMAP diet)
85g Cocoa Powder
60g Powdered Coconut Milk
tiny pinch of salt (to your taste)
To make your milk chocolate, start with melting the coconut oil or butter. Coconut oil is easier to buy, so I guess you'll probably be using it most of the time, but if you can get hold of coconut butter it's worth it as it gives you slightly stronger structure and the chocolate will have the perfect snap. This is because coconut butter melts at higher temperature than coconut oil.
Once your coconut oil is melted, add your coconut powdered milk and gently stir. Don't be even tempted to replace the powdered coconut milk with fresh liquid milk. Chocolate doesn't like water and it would cause the chocolate to split. If you find anything else that's plant based powdered milk, you can swap it for that.
Once the milk powder melts, add the sugar and carry on stirring. Depending on how healthy you want your chocolate to be, you can swap the icing sugar for stevia, maple syrup or other liquid plant based sugars. Just be careful to lower the amount of the sugar you are adding in. I found that adding about half of the original quantity is about right. This is because liquid sugar has different structure than powdered sugar and your chocolate would become too liquid and you might have problems with setting your chocolate.
Once everything is melted, add cocoa powder. Like with any other chocolate recipe, the better quality of cocoa powder you get the better quality of chocolate you'll end up with. This especially applies to milk chocolate recipes where the cocoa powder is not as high quantity as dark chocolate recipes.
Finally add a tiny pinch of salt. This might surprise you, but until now, we have been adding pretty much just sugary and fairly bland ingredients. And sugar is normally fairly bland to taste. To bring all the flavours together a tiny pinch of salt is the perfect way to finish this recipe. If you don't believe me, taste the chocolate before you add any salt and then afterwards. I bet you'll love the final taste!!!
Once everything is mixed, carry on stirring the chocolate with a spatula (or even a balloon whisk). This cools down the chocolate, make it slightly thicker and temper the chocolate (somewhat...). Then just pour your chocolate to a chocolate bar mould or even just on a flat tray lined with a parchment and let to set in a fridge for about 20 min. If you fancy it, you can also add freeze dried raspberries or other dried fruit, nuts of seeds to make your chocolate bar extra special.
After that just enjoy and do let me know how you get on!
