Yeah – I said it! This chocolaty treat not only tastes great, but it doesn’t have all the nasties that real Nutella has.  No unethically sourced palm oil, no soy lecithin, and no artificial flavours and no fragmented processed dairy.

We use Cacao that is packed with anti-oxidants and minerals.  The list of benefits for raw cacao is pretty amazing, anti-aging, heart protecting, mood boosting, and so on.

So are you excited yet? You had me at chocolaty!

I use cacao nibs over cacao powder, because it is a less processed form of cacao that still has some of the nutritious cacao butter still intact.  Truthfully I don’t taste the difference between high quality cacao powder and cacao nibs in this recipe, I just like using minimally processed foods.   You could even try this recipe with the whole cacao bean but they are crazy expensive and I feel like I wouldn’t get through a bag before they oxidize.   So what about cocoa powder? Did you even notice the difference in words? I use CACAO powder, not cocoa powder. Wait- what?  What is the difference? I’m glad you asked.  CACAO is the name of the bean used to make chocolate. COCOA is roasted and then processed  with high heat to remove all the cacao butter form of the cacao bean.  Basically cacao is raw and cocoa is not.

I use whole raw, skin-on hazelnuts because they are fresher.

Ingredients:

• 1 ½ cups raw hazelnuts
• 2 Tbsp raw cacao nibs (or cacao powder if that’s what you’ve got)
• 1 Tbsp coconut oil
• ¼ Cup raw honey
• ¼ Cup + 2 Tbsp water

Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

Place hazelnuts on a parchment lined baking sheet and bake for 20 min.  I shake the pan half way through just to move them around.  You will know they are done when their dark brown skins start to crack.

Pull from oven and allow to cool for about 5 minutes.

Dump toasted nuts onto one half of a clean tea towel. Fold tea towel in half and start rolling nuts between the towel.  This friction will start to peel the skins off.  You want to get most of the skins off.  Some of these little suckers wont give it up, but as long as you’ve got most off your good.

Place naked nuts and cacao nibs into your food processor and process like you would any nut butter.  There will be stages of doneness, crumbly, and even more dry crumbly, then there will be a kind of stick phase and a wet smooth phase.  You want to process until it is the consistency of nut butter, this can take 5-10 min depending on your machine.

When the mixture is smooth and silky, add in your coconut oil and raw honey. The mixture will be a little warm so don’t worry about pre melting your coconut.  Process for another minute to get this all mixed in. Your mixture will start to look less smooth and dry again, don’t worry.  Add the water all at once and process until it’s beautifully smooth and satiating.  Cacao is said by some to be an aphrodisiac… mmmmmmhummmm!

This will keep in the fridge for a week or so, but never lasts that long.  I put a scoop in my version of bulletproof coffee for an extra treat.  We put it on homemade grain-free wrappers, or on apples.