Chocolate is delicious and high in polyphenols which provide cardiovascular protection, but a lot of bars contain bad fat and excess sugar; not good.
Let's start with the pure thing, pure cacao - 99 percent - and use it to get in some other healthy goodies.
Goji berries and stevia will be used for sweetening. Stevia is safe and has no calories.
The goji berries are in the 'candy machine' I got from my daughter. Goji berries used to be very expensive, but now you can find this superfood at affordable prices.
Pure cacao is high in saturated fat. And although only half of this saturated fat in cacao - called palmitic fat - raises your bad cholesterol, we still want to decrease it. Therefore, we'll add some scoops of my super nut mix, and get better-balanced nutrients as an extra. We'll also make the chocolate more filling, by adding whey protein.
Did you know that bringing up the protein level in your food helps to feel satiated? Adding some crushed whole grain rice cakes - these are without added salt - will add volume and decrease the fat, so the caloric density goes down.
Finally, we'll add some ginger and cinnamon to spice things up. Cinnamon will increase insulin sensitivity, and ginger will boost testosterone.
Making it was fun, but took a full 40 minutes in total, and melting the chocolate was a bit tricky, but now I have a chocolate bar supply of which I know exactly what it contains. Unlike a lot of candy bars these are free of trans fats and palm fat. However, it's not something I'll be doing every week 😀
Note that the chocolate was melted in a 'bain-mari' to avoid burning.
Enjoy 😋
All ingredients are cacao, fresh ginger, bee pollen, cinnamon, pistachios, walnuts, peanuts, pumpkin seeds, almonds, goji berries, stevia, flaxseeds, whole grain rice, and whey protein.
Let's take a look at the macronutrients.
For a 10-gram serving size, we have 52 kcal for the healthier chocolates, versus 59 for the pure cacao, and the healthier one has more volume as well. You can see that the protein nearly doubled from 1.5 to 2.67. The total fat went down from 81 percent of the calories to 65 percent. The saturated fat decreased as well.
If enough interest, I'll post the full nutrients table as well.
PS: chili flakes and a little honey would be nice to add as well, even popped quinoa could work
Rice cakes without added salt, but you could use popped rice without sugar as well.
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