I started making this Dark Chocolate sweetened with Maple Syrup recipe 7 years ago when I was working at Trader Joes to *try* and avoid eating the snacks that got opened in the back room. At that time TJ’s sold a 100% Montezuma chocolate bar and that’s what I used. Now I use the cacao paste from essential organics. I find the paste or bar works MUCH better than cacao or cocoa powder, I’ve tried this recipe substituting with powder and it ends up being very runny and thin and not the same final consistancy. Because this bar has coconut oil it needs to stay in the fridge or freezer or it will melt. I keep mine in the freezer.
Yield: 9×13 dish of chocolate bark
Ingredients:
200g Cacao Paste (or 100% cacao/cocoa bar)
105g Coconut Oil
85g Maple Syrup
1 tsp Homemade Vanilla
1/4 tsp Salt
Optional Toppings: Toasted Coconut, Roasted Pecans, Walnuts, Sea Salt Flakes, Etc.
1.Place Medium Size sauce pan on scale and add cacao pasta, coconut oil and maple syrup.
2.Place pot on burner- on medium low heat. You are just warming it to melt the cacao paste and coconut oil so you don’t want to make it super hot. Continually mix until melted.
3.The syrup really needs to be mixed in, sometimes if you under mix it will separate in the freezing process.
4.Once everything is mostly melted add vanilla.
5.You can also add salt at this point, but I usually prefer to hold off on the salt until the chocolate is in the glass dish.
6. Pour your melted chocolate mix into a 9×13 glass pyrex. (You could also pour it on cookie sheet with parchment paper, but it comes right off the glass in the freezer, so no need to waste parchment paper in my opinion.)
7. Add your toppings and sprinkle with salt if you haven’t already added salt.
8. If the chocolate is super hot, wait until it cools a bit then place in freezer or fridge. If the dish is still a bit warm, I’ll put pot holders under it.
9. Check back in about an hour and it will be ready for you to break apart, I usually do this with a knife, and store it in a mason jar in the freezer.
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