Chocolate Love - Sour Cherry Spelt Chocolate Biscuits

I love chocolate.
The trouble is it doesn't always love my waistline me back!
So while I keep my store bought chocolate to occasional treats I love to make home-made choccy goodies for me and my children, especially for my kids as I try to keep the chemicals in their life to a minimum.
These are our latest love...

Sour Cherry, Spelt Chocolate Biscuits

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup coconut oil ( I use Jt's Coconut Essence )
• 2 tablespoons rice malt syrup ( or raw honey or stevia - you can increase the amount to suit your personal sweet tastes, this worked well for our family, if you do increase it will change the mixture as it is a liquid so you will need to tweak accordingly )
• 1 teaspoon organic vanilla paste
• 1 &1/2 cups wholemeal spelt flour ( I got mine from coles )
• 1 & 1/2 cups of macadamia meal ( I use Nutworks ) 
• 1/4 cup sour cherries ( I used the Morello brand in a jar - but if you can find dried sour cherries ( I seem to have a lot of trouble on the Sunny Coast!) they would be lovely in this - just tweak the mixture if needed so it is not too dry)
• 2 tablespoon cacao ( if you want them super chocolately increase this)
• Tiny pinch Pink Himalayan Salt
• Optional > 1 tablespoon SuperFoodsForKids Choc Berry Chunk (because why not and it's yummy and organic!)

Method

• Preheat oven to 180'c
• Your coconut oil should be really soft or lightly melted, if it's not gently and on a low heat melt it to a pliable consistency.
• Combine coconut oil and rice malt syrup in a large bowl.
• Blend in the vanilla paste, cacao and salt.
• Mix through the spelt flour and macadamia meal mixing until it looks like a biscuit dough. (I would recommend tasting at this point to make sure it is sweet enough for your liking - if not add some more sweetener and then tweak the dry ingredients as needed.
• Drain well and then stir through the sour cherries. 
• Line baking trays with baking paper - (I use if you care - chemical free, ethical baking paper ) 
• Roll mixture into balls and arrange on baking trays.
• Press down the balls with a fork and if desired press in some sour cherry pieces and loose macadamia meal for decoration purposes.
• Bake for approximately 10 minutes depending on your oven. I would stay close and keep and eye on them.
• Remove from oven and cool on wire racks.

Toddler Tips

• I like to make really tiny ones for little hands.
• You can mix in some choc chips or cacao nibs if desired.

Notes

• To make these even more decadent, we dipped the bottoms of ours in homemade cacao chocolate. There are so many gorgeous home-made choccy recipe getting around on the internet, we have tried and tweaked many, some we liked, some we really didn't. We finally came up with this and love to use it:

Easy Cacao Chocolate

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup cacao butter ( I got mine in a large container from Maleny IGA)
• 2 tablespoons rice malt syrup
• 3 tablespoon cacao
• 1 teaspoon vanilla paste
• tiny pinch pink Himalayan salt

Method:

• Melt the cacao butter very gently on a low heat or as you would chocolate with double saucepans over boiling water. 
• Remove from heat and in a bowl mix the cacao butter and rice malt syrup, stir in the vanilla paste, cacao and salt, make sure it is well blended.
• Allow to cool a little but so it is still runny.
• Dip the bottoms of cooled biscuits into the chocolate, you may want to spread a little on as well. 
• Place the biscuits chocolate side up on a tray and place in the fridge to set.
• Keep the chocolate biscuits in a really air tight container in the fridge - if they last that long!

If your finding yourself in choccy love right about now - let me tempt you further into the wonderful world of healthier, alternative chocolate.

The absolutely incredible Natural New Age Mum - aka Sonia who is one of my absolute favourite bloggers and healthy lifestyle advocates of all time on all things living natural and healthy put together the most incredible post Healthy Home-Made Chocolate Bars

Yes many of your favourite chocolate bar indulgences in healthier, preservative free taste bud loving yum!
Isn't she gorgeous doing that!

And another of my favourite healthy living and food bloggers, who takes food pictures that literally make you drool, made these......

Chocolate Peanut Butter Bites

To me I see these and a organic wine pot of herbal tea and Mr Darcy on TV would be a rather lovely night in .Visit her foodliscious blog HERE and check her out on Facebook too and say HI!

And of course I have lots of  chocclisciousness for you like:

Chocolate zucchini and chia seed cake

Beetroot and Yoghurt Chocolate Muffins (no added sugar)

No added sugar, fudgey, gluten free choccy cake

Raw energy date, pecan and macadamia slice
(no cook slice)

Chocolate macadamia ice-cream (easy)

You can also enter the word CHOCOLATE in the search this blog feature on the top right hand side of this blog and then scroll through, you will find LOTS, yes, I do have a bit of chocolate love going on!

Happy Cooking
Bek XXX