Raw chocolate macaroons - No equipment required

Hi, I am Laura-Jane The Rawtarian from www.therawtarian.com, where I make simple, satisfying raw food recipes. 

And today, we are going to be making raw haystacks, AKA raw chocolate macaroons, and this is a super, duper simple recipe. 

You will notice, where is my trusty Vitamix blender, where is my trusty food processor? They are nowhere to be found. All we need is a bowl for this recipe. And some very key ingredients. Because what we are going to be doing is combining all of these ingredients into this bowl, and mixing with a very tiny spoon, and then we are going to forming them into little drop-cookies, or macaroons, dollops, onto this cookie sheet.

And then we are just going to freeze it, and then within half an hour, they're going to solidify and then they are going to be the most delicious, chocolatey coconutty goodness. So that is what we are going to be doing today!

And in terms of ingredients, we have 2 1/2 cups dried, unsweetened shredded coconut, between half a cup and 3/4 of a cup of coconut oil. This is cold-pressed coconut oil, but depending on the temperature in your house it will either be solid, like, this, or it will be liquid, like this, if it's warmer in your house. It's the same product it just depends on the temperature.

So for this recipe, you do want to make sure that your coconut oil is liquid, because all we are doing is stirring so you need it to be warmed up a little bit. You could use a double-boiler, so basically what you could do is put your globby coconut oil in this, and then put it in a bigger glass with hot water in it and it'll melt really quickly. This is one of the few recipes where that really does matter, otherwise it's not going to mix properly. 

So we said we have our coconut oil, and we have a 1/4 teaspoon sea salt, we have 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract, we have half a cup of cacao powder, and a half a cup of sweetener, today I am using maple syrup but you could use honey or agave nectar, whatever you're more comfortable with.

I alluded to it at the beginning, all we are going to be doing is mixing everything into this bowl, which I hope you can see.

I think I am remembering that I need a bigger bowl. We can persevere. It's easier if you combine all the liquids together first. 

Because it's way easier if you go like this. Put everything except the coconut into this bowl. And I'm just going to scrape the rest of this out, because if we have the coconut in there it'll be too hard to mix. Because we want this to be a wet mixture. 

Maybe I'll just mix this a little bit.

I love your comments, because you can always tell when I'm a little flustered, but we can't be perfect! 

This isn't going to be completely mixed, we just want to give this a bit of a head start so that we can get the coconut going. This is quite the chocolatey mixture! And I also have similar cookies that I call the Vanilla Drop Cookies, that are a bit of a play on this recipe. That don't include cacao powder so they're not chocolatey. And actually those ones include tahini, which is sesame seed butter, which is kind of gross on its own, kind of like butter, in that you don't want to just eat butter, but when you combine it it's very tasty. 

You want to get it so that it looks somewhat like a chocolatey mixture. This is a pretty big recipe, and you could easily halve it.

I don't have children, but I imagine that this would be very fun and easy to do with kids, because it doesn't take long. Even the waiting aspect of it isn't long, literarily half an hour in the freezer. It's because of the coconut oil that they solidify so fast in the freezer. 

This is still really liquidy because we haven't added all of the coconut yet. These are great because you can leave them in the freezer for a long time, and they're really sweet so you don't need a lot of them. After dinner one would totally satisfy your sweet, chocolaty craving. And as you know, I love to keep something sweet in the freezer all the time for the low moments when you want to reach for something sweet but you don't feel like making a whole production, so I do try to keep something in the freezer. 

So here we have this mixture, and I am just going to get in there with my hands. So basically the mixture is done and now we want to form little cookies.

I said I was going to go in there with my hands, but you could go like this with a spoon, and as long as they are generally touching each other, they will freeze together. Or my instinct is to use my hands, but they are kind of sticky though. They are kind of odd feeling. It's not the most satisfying, but you could make little macaroons. You could also use little silicone molds. 

What I would do now, is they are done, but they need to harden so that you can eat them. So you just pop that in the freezer for half an hour (or longer because you can't over-freeze!) And then you just leave them in the freezer, you don't want to refrigerate them. Also, if you were to take them and put them in your child's lunch at school all day in the hot summer, they will just melt and go back to this texture. So really  you want to freeze them and eat them frozen. 

I really need to go wash my hands, so thank you so much for joining me, I am The Rawtarian from www.therawtarian.com, and I hope to see you next time!