Hey there. No, I haven’t found my notebook, but I worked up natural sugar chocolate chips this week so I have that recipe in a new place :-). I even tested them in my chocolate chip cookies for you (because how can I know if a chocolate chip recipe is any good unless I know how it bakes up?)! Of course, they’re still actually chocolate chunks, but if you want to pipe it into little kiss shapes or put it in a mold I suppose you could…but it seems a tad silly, I gotta tell you. More work than it’s really worth!

Now, about these chocolate chunks. They are softer than commercial chocolate due to the lack of shelf-stabilizing additives. That’s why I titled this just “natural” chocolate chips, instead of natural sugar chocolate chips–my goal was not just to remove the processed sugar, but also the lecithin and other yucky stuff mostly there to make it saleable in stores. That does mean that these melt more, though, so whatever you use them in is likely to spread/melt more. However, it did stay relatively localized in the cookies, though. That is, it didn’t disperse into the dough so once they cooled it still looked like a chocolate chunk cookie, not just a chocolate cookie. I suspect if you’re using these in a batter, like a muffin or cake, you’ll want to let it sit in the pan a little longer before getting it out, just to let it stabilize more. All that said…these are DELICIOUS. I don’t like chocolate much; when I use normal chocolate chips, or even the store-bought chocolate I recommend in the cookie recipe (and which I’ll continue to use when I don’t have time to make these!) I don’t snitch it. I just don’t like it enough. I had a hard time staying out of these, as did my 2 1/2 year old, who ALSO doesn’t normally like chocolate.

So, without further ado, here is the chocolate chip recipe! (Oh, pictures later–I saw no reason to take more pictures of the cookies, and I’ll need more chips to take a picture, since those went into cookies.)

Natural Chocolate Chips

Yield: About 2 cups, depending on how you chop ’em

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup coconut oil (it’s a solid at room temp, usually still labeled as an oil, though)
• 1/2 cup coco powder
• 2 TBS Brown Rice Syrup
• 3 TBS real Maple Syrup
• 1 1/2 tsp Vanilla

Directions:

1. Melt the brown rice syrup and maple syrup together in a small sauce pan over medium heat. Bring to a boil.

2. Immediately add the coconut oil and boil while whisking for a minute or two. If it isn’t quite combining at this point, don’t worry.

3. Pour into a mixing bowl and add coco powder. Whisk vigorously until well-combined; this may take a few minutes.

4. Add vanilla and whisk some more until well-combined again.

5. Pour into a cake pan (or dish with similar surface area) that has had the bottom lined with parchment paper (not wax paper, it’ll stick in the chocolate and get in the food and the whole point of this is to NOT have waxy chocolate!). Shake a little to level it out, then put in the freezer, sitting flat and level, for at least two hours.

6. Once the chocolate is solid (it may be less than two hours, but I checked mine then and it was nice and frozen) remove it from the pan, quickly break and chop it into chunks the size you want, then use immediately or put in a ziplock and store in the freezer until use. That means even if you won’t be using it for 20 minutes, put it back in the freezer. It won’t melt back to a liquid, but it will be really really soft if let to sit, and then it will distribute into your dough when you mix. You have to add them strait from the freezer. The extra can be saved for later use so long as it is kept in the freezer. Enjoy!