On my weekends, in a fit of Youtube-and-recipe-blog-induced inspiration, I sometimes like to try out recipes or create my own snacks as desserts, snacks or breakfast items throughout the week. Bearing in my mind my impatient and somewhat efficient persona, the things that I make are often not aesthetically pleasing, or hit items with the family (they much prefer the commonplace muffin and breads which they recognise as food). Even if I don’t like to wait, I like to make, so I still continue, without shame, to experiment in the kitchen.
I enjoy creating food, especially when there’s a space of my own – no people to care about how you scour the pots, a clear countertop to arrange items for preparation, and the feeling of the luxury of time in a personal space to mix, roll, and feel. Maybe it’s a sensory thing, but I especially like kneading dough. Hands in, finger pushing through squishy mass, indentations feeling cold and floury. I just like that sensation.
Today I tried out Aimee Song’s recipe for coconut chocolate balls, with many substitutions in the mix.
Chocolate vanilla date bites (yes I know, I did not stay true to name).
What You’ll Need:
1 Cup Cacao Powder (I used 1/4 cup cocoa powder from West Coast Cocoa and 1/4 cup vanilla protein powder from Bob’s Red Mill)
1/2 Cup of Coconut Oil
10-15 Medjool Dates (depending on how sweet you want them to be)
Dash of Cinnamon
2 Tablespoons Vanilla Extract
Thick Coconut Shred
Fine Coconut Shred (None of this for me)
What You’ll Do:
- Dump the cocoa powder, vanilla extract, cinnamon, and vanilla protein powder into a bowl, grab a spoon, and mix up white and brown together. Basically all the powders, beat em up.
- Pour in the coconut oil into the powder mixture, stir it and heave in the scent of coconut fragrance with gasping breaths, as though you can’t get enough.
- Peel up halves of the medjool dates and toss them in the blender. If they’re too big, please make them smaller by cutting them up. Switch on your blender and pulverize the dates into sticky, mashy date pulp. Like that last date which went wrong. Yup.
- Stir together the date mixture and the powder-coconut bomb mixture into a love-potion-churn of thick, sweet, goodness. Sprinkle coconut flakes on top into the rich, dense, dark beauty, then pick chunks out of the batter to massage into balls. Be prepared to get down and dirty with your hands. Also, wonder how much coconuts do the Americans consume, and marvel at the phenomenon of exotic Asian ingredient marketing.
- Once you’re done making the balls and washing the saccharine sweetness off your hands, place them in the freezer for about half an hour or so. Check on your babies, and if they cry with moistness still, it’s probably not ready yet.
- When they look firm and supple, take one out and chow down.
So there you have it. For pictures, I didn’t take any as they weren’t pretty and honestly looked like constipated lumps with fibre in them. Despite this vivid and stunning description, I have to say that they were pretty good for a date-bite snack. If I do make them again the next time though, I wouldn’t use the cocoa as it contained granulated sugar so everything was double the sweetness, and my views on protein powder are as such: they taste odd. So I’m not ordering any more protein powders on iherb anymore.
Till next time!
happenstance 