I made my own chocolate!

Making chocolate is easy! And so rewarding! Chocolate on AIP should be eaten in moderation and only once you are reintroducing foods back into your diet. Once you get the basics to making chocolate at home, you can start to experiment and play around with flavours, such as adding lavender or violet or mint or orange (but no artificial flavouring please!).  I do not really have a set method, you taste along the way and make up the recipe!

To start with you need some key ingredients and good quality ones at that. The key ingredients being cocoa/cacao butter and cacao powder. Cocoa butter can come as a solid lump or in button shapes which are handy for melting quicker.

Start by melting the cocoa butter gently in a glass bowl sitting in a saucepan of water. Be careful not to get any water in your chocolate mixture at any stage of the process. Once melted, remove from the heat and with a whisk, mix in some honey – about 1-2 tablespoons. I like to use a raw cold pressed manuka honey but that can be expensive and any honey will work as a sweetener. Optional at this point is a bit of organic vanilla powder and then the cacao powder, roughly 7-8 tablespoons. As you add the powder, keep tasting the mixture, its all about personal preference here – you may like your chocolate bitter or a bit sweeter, I also like to add a bit of sea salt to the mix.

Now on a baking sheet covered in parchment paper, drip with a spoon small amounts of the mixture, so you make large or small (or both) buttons. Or you can pour mixture into a mould. To make them into bear shapes like in the picture I used one of these.