Raw brownie recipe

Raw brownies are one of the essentials to add to your list if you're following a raw diet or want to incorporate more natural foods into your day-to-day eating plan.

Raw brownies are made up cacao powder and Medjool dates along with sesame seeds, orange juice and maple syrup. This makes them not only entirely made up of natural ingredients but also significantly healthier than regular brownies, which are full of sugar and butter. People often refer to these raw brownies as 'energy balls' and with good reason, as just one of these balls will keep you going for a couple of hours before lunch or dinnertime.

Ingredients

• 120g sesame seeds
• 120g pecan nuts or any nuts of your choice
• 120g Mejdool dates
• 4-5tbsp raw cacao powder (you can substitute the raw cacao powder with cocoa powder but you may need to add a little more. Add to your personal taste).
• 4tbsp freshly-squeezed orange juice
• 1tbsp of maple syrup (optional)

Method

1. First of all you will need to locate your food processor. I found mine at the back of the kitchen cupboard covered in a fine layer of dust. A quick wash and we were ready to go!
2. The food processor does a lot of work in this recipe but we still want our little helpers to do as much as possible. With this in mind, ask your child to weigh all of the ingredients into small bowls, so that they will be easily at hand when required. Weighing the sesame seeds was an interesting experience, I think we will be finding the tiny little seeds in the kitchen for quite some time.
3. When it comes to weighing the dates, we weighed ours before we extracted the stone. It is easy for your child to remove the stone from the middle of the dates. They can do this with their fingers - it's a sticky but a fun job for them to do.
4. Ask your helper to pour the sesame seeds and nuts carefully into the food processor. Pulse your processor until the nuts have turned into a fine crumble, the same size as breadcrumbs. Be sure not to over blitz the mixture or the nuts will form a paste!
5. Next your little assistant can add the stoned dates, cacao powder, orange juice and maple syrup.
6. Give the mixture another good whizz in the food processor. All the ingredients will combine and should form into a sticky but firm mixture.
7. Remove the sharp blade from your food processor and then set your child to work! They can grab small amounts of mixture with their hands then roll them into neat balls. The brownie bites can be rolled in more cacao powder, cinnamon or coconut if liked, but we kept ours plain.
8. The brownie bites look really cute when placed into petit four cases, if you have any going spare.
9. We stored our brownie bites in the fridge because we think they taste even better when chilled but they will keep well in an airtight container for up to a week.

Top tips for making raw brownie:

If you're finding that your raw brownies aren't sticking together quite as well as they should, add 15g of peanut butter to your overall mixture and try to roll up the mixture into balls again. While not a completely natural or raw ingredient, peanut butter is still healthy and full of protein and good fats.

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