| The Rawtarian

Rawtarian's Raw Brownies

By The Rawtarian

In this video The Rawtarian shows you how to make raw brownies in a food processor.

I show you how to make my raw brownies. 1 food processor, 6 ingredients, 10 minutes. Shockingly yummy!

This is, by far, my most popular recipe ever. Don't believe me? Check out the recipe and the 600+ comments here!

Video Transcript

Hi. I’m Laura-Jane from therawtarian.com and today we’re going to be making one of my absolute favorite raw food recipes, raw brownies, and they’re super easy to make because all you need is a food processor and a big dish and your ingredients and you’re all set. So I know that you want to know what are those ingredients.

We have 1 cup of walnuts or pecans. They’re both similar in terms of texture so they are swappable. We have 1 cup of dates. We have 5 tablespoons of raw cacao powder or cocoa powder. 4 tablespoons of unsweetened shredded coconut. 2 tablespoons of your favorite sweetener. Today, I’m using some local honey. 2 tablespoons. And then the ¼ teaspoon of sea salt.

So how this is going to work is that we’re going to process the nuts first. So we got the 1 cup of walnuts, and we’re going to process them until they become quite fine, small, and crumbly. Something like you’d want to pinch and crumble on top of ice cream or something like that.

Almost there.

Pretty good. So now, we are going to add our 1 cup of dates. You can use Medjool dates or you can use—if you don’t have those or your budget does not allow for fresh dates, you can also use what I call baking dates which are not necessarily raw but they’re in the baking aisle and they’re a lot less expensive if you’re trying to really experiment with this on a budget. So we’re just gonna add those and then get it to combine very nicely.

A little more.

Perfection. I might just pause as well to show you. Food processor, although I love them, sometimes they are my nemesis. I hope you can see this. We have a nice crumbly texture. We’ve got little chunks of dates and walnuts. Delicious. Now frequently, I hear people tell me they don’t really like dates so they’re not gonna like this recipe. This recipe tastes like chocolate brownies. It does not taste like dates. The dates are there to give stickiness and sweetness, but it doesn’t taste like dates. They don’t taste like dates I should say. So we’re adding our 5 tablespoons of cacao powder. We are adding the 4 tablespoons of coconut. We are getting a spoon or cuillère in French because I did take French immersion in elementary school until it no longer meshed well with my personality. We have ¼ teaspoon of sea salt. Sea salt has a very different than table salt so I definitely recommend sea salt for this one. So we’ve added everything else. We’re processing again and once we stop, we will have brownie mixture.

Yes, I almost forgot. We don’t want to overprocess this because it could quickly turn into sort of a sludgy, fudgy chocolate mess. So what you will want to do—you saw how long I processed that for so. It really wasn’t very long. And now again, I want to show you this because basically our brownie batter is done. I want to show you the crumbly texture of this and what we want to have happen is we want to be able to stick it together so that it sticks together, but we also—gonna show you again—we want some airiness so that, see how it’s like there’s little balls and they’re not all stuck together. It’s not like a pancake batter or big fudge. You really want that air because you don’t want to overprocess it. So our batter is done, and I think these taste fabulous on their own, but I also have a fabulous—how many times can I say fabulous? Raw recipe for a really nice fudge kind of topping icing, if you will, but we won’t talk about that yet. So you can see what we’ve done is spread out this crumbly mixture and then this is important, we want to smush it down into your pan because in order for it to stick together and be easy to slice, we really need to put some pressure on it and just smush it. Technical terms here at therawtarian.com. So what we’re really doing is pushing it down into your pan. You could do truffles. You could roll it into a ball if you want it instead. You could put it and it doesn’t have to be this shape of the pan. Really, it’s such a versatile recipe that anything, not anything, but you know what I’m saying. Any container that you have is going to be fine. One of my main mottos in terms of raw food is just make it work and make it simple. So really what you want to do is push that down real firmly and, really, that’s it. I’m going to pop this in the refrigerator. You certainly could eat it now. It’s ready. The only issue, and I don’t have a knife out here so easily, but is that right at the exact moment, it’s not going to cut as cleanly as if it’s been in the fridge. So I’ve made it. I’m going to pop it in the fridge for at least an hour just to firm up a titch and then I’m also going to leave it in the fridge all the time and then just enjoy nibbling from it.

So I’m Laura-Jane from therawtarian.com, where I share lots of simple, satisfying raw food recipes. I’d love for you to join me here. My main motto is not too many ingredients, not too many steps, let’s just have it taste amazing, and be easy to create. So thank you so much for joining me and I hope to hear from you soon.

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My smart phone apps

By The Rawtarian

In this video, The Rawtarian shares all about her raw food smart phone apps! Links to apps below.

The Rawtarian's Raw Recipes Apps
Got a mobile device? The app (for iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch and Android devices) contains all of The Rawtarian's raw food recipes from her website into an easy-to-browse-and-use format. Perfect for the kitchen!
Direct links for quick purchase from your smart phone:
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brightflock.rawrec
Apple (iPod/iPad etc): https://itunes.apple.com/app/rawtarians-raw-recipes/id570972794

Raw Meal Plans Mobile App
No browsing, no decision-making and no need to choose recipes. Just start your plan and let me guide you through each raw day, meal-by-meal. Simple and delicious! App contains 6 separate weekly or monthly raw food meal plans, including simple, satisfying raw recipes for breakfast, snacks, lunch, dinner and dessert.
Direct links for quick purchase from your smart phone:
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brightflock.rawmeal
Apple (iPod/iPad etc): https://itunes.apple.com/app/rawtarians-raw-meal-plans/id637781859

More details here: http://www.therawtarian.com/store

Read more about My smart phone apps

Rawtarian's Chocolate Icing

By The Rawtarian

In this video, The Rawtarian shows you how to make chocolate icing in your blender.

This is a six-minute tutorial showing you how to make raw chocolate icing using dates, cacao, water and coconut oil. A blender is required for this recipe.

Full recipe and written instructions on how to make this raw chocolate icing recipe here!

Video Transcript

Hi. I’m Laura-Jane, The Rawtarian, from therawtarian.com where I make simple satisfying raw food recipes and today, I’m going to be showing you how to make my go-to raw chocolate icing, which you can use to ice brownies or cakes or anything else that needs icing, or you can lick it off the spoon if you’re having a bad day.

So all we’re really needing here is we’re going to need a blender. Ideally, it’s going to be a high speed blender which just means it’s super strong and it can blend harder things like dates.

Here, what I do have is 1 cup of dates, and it’s been soaking not for very long like 20 minutes in ¾ of a cup of water. And we need both of those ingredients. So a cup of dates and ¾ of a cup of water. The reason I mix them together is to soften the dates, especially if your blender is kind of crappy. You might want to just soak them a little while you’re getting everything else ready.

Then we have a ¼ cup of raw cacao powder or cocoa powder. It’s unsweetened. We also have a critical ingredient for this recipe: coconut oil. The reason it’s critical is because what the coconut oil is going to do is it’s going to solidify when it’s cold. So generally when you use this icing, you have your cake or, in this case, I’m using a brownie, a batch of raw brownies that I just made, but what you’re gonna want to do is ice the thing and then pop it in the fridge so that it can solidify. So it is coconut oil and it’s mandatory. No, you cannot use olive oil. There’s no substitute. It’s coconut oil or bust.

So super easy recipe just like most of mine. I try to keep them easy. All we’re gonna do is combine everything in the blender, blend it up, and we’re done.

I know this is kind of a wide bowl for getting in here. Wish me luck. Oh dear. We did it.

So again, that’s our 1 cup of dates with ¾ cup of water. This is the ¼ cup of cacao powder. You could use carob if you don’t do cacao. But if you do carob, not to confuse you, but if you are using carob, you want to use a little more carob because carob has a weaker flavor than cacao or cocoa powder. That’s everything. This could be a scary, hairy ride depending on how everything goes, but really we’re just blending it up.

Sometimes, it can be a bit of a brat when blending. So we’re going to start real slow and see how it goes.

Not bad. Increasing it. High.

That was easy, and I think it was easy because I did pre-soak those dates not for very long. Maybe 20 minutes. And they were quite hard. So you don’t have to do that but it can make the blending aspect easier.

So I don’t know if you can see inside my blender. Chocolaty goodness! Let’s just get this.

So really, our icing is ready. Let me just pour a little bit in here to show you what the texture is like. So again, it’s going to solidify more when it’s in the fridge. That’s just to show you a little bit of it. Flavor. It—okay. I know what you’re thinking. You don’t like the flavor of dates and therefore you won’t like this. It doesn’t taste like dates. It tastes like chocolate. Much like when you make a cake with eggs, you don’t like eggs. You don’t really care because it doesn’t taste like eggs, not that I eat eggs, but delicious.

But really, our icing is done and you could just stop watching here if you like. I had previously in another video just made raw brownies. They’re really easy too if you have a food processor, and the reason I made that icing right now is to ice the brownies, and it’s easy obviously because I made it in this really simple pan.

So you would just pop it on. Now if you are—if you have already made these brownies, I frequently will double the batter of the brownies to go with this larger batch of icing. So it’s a bit icing heavy with a single batch.

But yes! There it is! And it will—it’s not going to get like firm, firm in the fridge but it’s going to be really be nice so that you can cut it easily and that our raw chocolate icing.

I’m not really going to spend the time to ice this right now because you don’t need to watch that. You know how to ice a cake. But yeah, this would work too if you have a cake like on a fancy cake plate that’s elevated. You could ice it for sure.

And the last thing I would say is I’m Laura-Jane, The Rawtarian, from therawtarian.com. I make simple, satisfying raw food recipes at my website, and I would love for you to join me there. My main motto of my shtick is that I only post very tasty, delicious recipes that work out really well and that tend to have a lot of wiggle room so that you can’t really screw them up. So it’s great if you’re just starting with raw food. And thank you so much for watching me. Come visit me at therawtarian.com and enjoy your raw adventure.