Looking for a personalised gift for your Valentine? Making your own raw chocolate hearts is a great idea, and if you use our Rawr Goji Chocolate Chunks — which are super-discounted broken chocolate bars, ideal for using in recipes — it’ll be a doddle!
And since the current price is just £1.73 for 100g of organic vegan chocolate, it’ll likely be cheaper than a shop-bought gift too.
(Even easier, you can enter to win a bag of chocolate hearts made by our chocolatiers; check out our giveaway on Instagram.)
You will need:
See, we said it was super simple! 🙂
If you give it a whirl, we’d love to see. Tag us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
We’re big fans of dairy-free ice cream. It’s so simple to make at home, and we’re getting through buckets of it now the summer’s in full swing!
We use a home ice cream machine (this one), which is super easy to use. A machine’s well worth the investment, but if you don’t have one you can also make ice cream by hand. Just pour the blended mixture into a tub and put it in the freezer, then give it a stir every half hour or so until it’s fully set. You won’t get as soft ice cream as you will if you use a machine, but it’ll still taste good!
Here are our favourite recipes. Feel free to tweak quantities and experiment with your own ingredient additions. As long as you keep the liquid to sweetener ratio about the same, it’s hard to go wrong.
Base
Blend:
780 ml coconut milk
320 ml coconut cream
1/2 cup coconut palm sugar or honey
Vanilla
Base + 1 tsp vanilla powder
Chocolate Chip
Base + 1/2 cup raw cacao powder + 1/2 tsp vanilla
After the ice cream comes out of the machine and is still soft (or, if making by hand, when it’s started to set in the freezer but isn’t fully solid), chop 2 Rawr Chocolate bars or a handful of goji chocolate chunks into small pieces and stir in. Then put in the freezer to set.
Chocolate Peanut Butter
Base + 1/2 cup cacao powder + 3 or 4 heaped tbsp nut butter
For toppings, we love our raw chocolate goji chunks, fresh fruit, cacao nibs, or a dollop of raw nut butter.
Happy ice cream making!
We love recipes made with our chocolate, and recently we’ve been blessed with lots from food and health bloggers! Many are raw and vegan, and easy to make at home on a rainy day.
All you need to get started is some chocolate (our goji chocolate chunks are a discounted way to buy raw chocolate to melt at home, find them here), and a quick trip to the kitchen cupboard or the shops.
If you come up with any recipes of your own using our chocolate, let us know as we’d love to share!
How delicious does this look? Made with 160g chocolate, oats, fruit, and dates, find the recipe on Curiously Conscious here.
A yummy take on raw fruit and nut balls, these are made with 100g chocolate, dates, nuts, and coconut oil. Find the recipe on The Food Teacher’s site here.
Here’s a recipe that’s perfect for summer. Frozen cupcakes using just three ingredients: 180g chocolate, banana, and almonds. Check out the recipe on Grains and Gains here.
And one for cooler nights! Healthy Living London used orange chocolate, but any flavour would work. (Mint hot chocolate? Now that sounds a treat.) Using 15g chocolate, cacao powder, milk or alternative, cinnamon, and coconut oil. Find the recipe here.
We’ve been feeling the love for Instagram lately, and Moni’s Meals is one account we love. Moni used our chocolate as a topping for this scrumptious oatmeal (recipe here). If you haven’t tried chocolate and porridge before, they’re perfect partners.
Rawberry Fields is one of favourite raw blogs. Rachel puts such care into every one of her posts, and her photos are beautiful. One of her particular skills is painting the inside of glass smoothie jars with raw chocolate — you have to see it to believe it! Check out one of my favourites here.
Rachel reviewed Rawr Chocolate here, and created a truly scrumptious brownie recipe, which you can find here.
Before Christmas I invested in a bunch of new books for my growing raw library – so many that I haven’t had time to go through them all yet! It’s already clear which are going to be my staples: usually those with non-specialist ingredients, beautiful layouts and the tastiest recipes. Here are my top 5 so far:
1. ANI’S RAW FOOD KITCHEN – Ani Phyo
This was my first raw book and is the one I always fall back on. With lots of recipes that don’t require a dehydrator, and lots of additional information about living the raw lifestyle (including raw food for dogs!), it’s definitely a favourite. Clear and easy to understand recipes, nicely presented, although not as high on pictures as some.
Recommended recipes: Coconut Breakfast Cakes (which we ate as pancakes on Shrove Tuesday last year), Baja Cheese Burrito with Taco Nut Meat and Red Pepper Corn Salsa (one of my all-time favourite recipes), Pecan Chai Pie.
One of the less mainstream raw books, not as glossy and photo-filled as some, yet contains amazing, straightforward recipes.
Recommended Recipes: Koftedes (‘meat’ balls that taste genuinely meaty. A great variation on raw falafel recipes), Houmus, Spinach Pie (delicious and creamy).
Jason Vale is the master of the raw juice world. Occasionally we’ll replace a meal with one of his vegetable juices, and we’ve used this book in the past for juice fasts/feasts. Has lots of nutritional information about fruit and veg, and includes juices to drink before bed or while ill.
Recommended Recipes: The Steven ‘Meal’burg (really filling juice/smoothie using carrots, apple, cucumber, avocado, cinnamon and more), The Schwarzenegger (massive juice for when you’re poorly, including pineapple, garlic, beetroot…).
An absolutely beautiful, thick, lustrous volume. One to dig out for special occasions rather than everyday eating. Recipes usually take more time to prepare and occasionally more specialist ingredients, but the ones I’ve tried have been divine.
Recommended Recipes: Soft Corn Tortillas (absolutely delicious though took a LOT of preparation. Ranks alongside Ani’s Baja Cheese Burrito as an all-time favourite), Macaroons.
Like ‘Raw Food Real World’ this makes a great coffee-table book. Really enjoyable to flick through, and the beautiful pictures alone will make your mouth water!
Recommended Recipes: Robbin’s Ice Cream (really sweet, gorgeous ice-cream, only a blender and freezer required. Mango, cashew, dates, bananas, fresh orange juice…).
I also really like Shazzie’s Evie’s Kitchen (make sure to at least double the recipes if making for yourself rather than small kids!), and Shannon and Duraz’s Raw Food Celebrations (great if making for guests). Equally there are books I would not recommend – beware those which use too many specialist superfoods, and if a recipe doesn’t have particularly tasty ingredients, it usually won’t be tasty when you’re finished. Just because it’s a recipe in a famous-name book doesn’t mean it will taste good!
There are more raw recipe books coming out all the time, here are a few more suggestions.
Easy / everyday recipes: Everyday Raw, Matthew Kenney; Raw Food Made Easy For 1 or 2 People, Jennifer Cornbleet; Easy Raw Vegan Dehydrating, Kristen Suzanne; Alive in 5: Raw Gourmet Meals in Five Minutes, Angela Elliot; Eat Smart Eat Raw, Kate Wood.
Gourmet: Living in the Raw Gourmet, Rose Lee Calabro; Raw Food Real World, Kenney and Melngailis; The Raw Gourmet, Nomi Shannon; Raw: the Uncook Book, Juliano.
Smoothies and juices: Green for Life, Victoria Boutenko; Ultimate Fast Food, Jason Vale.
Christmas and other holidays: Easy Raw Vegan Holidays, Kristen Suzanne; Raw Food Celebrations, Shannon and Duraz; Christmas Recipes ebook, Russell James.
Health-focussed: Recipes for Longer Life, Ann Wigmore; The Hippocrates Diet and Health Program, Ann Wigmore; Rainbow Green Live Food Cuisine, Gabriel Cousens; The Sunfood Diet Success System, David Wolfe; Living Foods for Optimum Health, Clement.