Ever since I made these dark chocolate coconut treats about a month or so ago, I have been a little obsessed with making simple little chocolate treats at home. On Easter, since we really don’t keep many sweets at home and we didn’t do the Easter basket thing, I was craving chocolate treats and decided to make some dark chocolate peanut butter cups. I didn’t take any photos since they weren’t totally perfect and I also decided I wanted to buy a mini-muffin tin so I could make smaller cups. The full size muffin cups are nice, but it is way more chocolate than what I need. I also thought it would be nice to make them with almond butter instead of peanut butter since I am so obsessed with it. Any nut or seed butter would work here, so play around. You will also see in my notes below that if you don’t wish to sweeten your own dark chocolate, you can simply just melt semi-sweet chocolate chips. I prefer to start with a good quality organic unsweetened dark chocolate something in the range of 70 – 100%, and then sweetened to my own liking since I like my dark chocolate to be subtly sweet. You may find that my measurements are too low and you want more sweetness. Go for it. Or skip sweetening it yourself and buy premade chocolate. Whatever you’d like.

I make these in a non-stick mini-muffin pan, like this one. You could definitely use a candy mold, a full sized  muffin tray or maybe even a larger ice-cube tray. If you’d like, you can also line your muffin pan with paper liners. I didn’t happen to have any, so I went without, and very lightly greased my pan with some coconut oil, to be sure they wouldn’t stick. They likely wouldn’t have stuck, but I wanted to be sure of it.

Some of you may be wondering why I included the chia seeds in the almond butter filling or if you could use flax seed meal instead. I decided to include it because besides LOVING chia seeds, I had some leftover ground up chia sees on hand after making these delicious tortilla wraps from The Spunky Coconut, over the weekend. I thought it would help bind together the filling so it wouldn’t be too runny and I also thought it was a nice way to add some of the lovely benefits that chia seeds have to offer. You can read more about all of those lovely benefits here in this post from Lexie’s Kitchen. Feel free to use ground flax seeds instead or to skip it all together. It isn’t a necessity in the recipe.

As far as the sea salt goes, I really adore the flavor combination of dark chocolate with sea salt, so I try to squeeze it into my life whenever humanly possible. It may actually be one of my all time favorite things. If you aren’t a fan of the luscious salty/sweet combo, leave off the salt. You could also press a single almond or some almond slices into each one.  Have fun.

What is your favorite flavor combination when it comes to sweets? 

[print_this]Dark Chocolate, Almond Butter Mini-Cups with Sea Salt – Gluten-free, Vegan + Refined Sugar-free
makes 12 mini-cups

Dark Chocolate Outside:

• 8-9 ounces of dairy-free, dark chocolate – (I used this unsweetened dark chocolate and sweetened it myself, as you can see below. If you use semi-sweet chocolate or chocolate chips you can skip the coconut oil and the sweeteners below.)

(optional if using unsweetened chocolate)

• 1 tablespoon coconut oil
• 3 tablespoons pure maple syrup*

Almond Butter Inside:

 

• 1/2 cup chilled organic unsalted almond butter (or any other nut butter or seed butter of your choice)

• 1 tablespoon ground chia seeds (you can just grind whole chia seeds in a coffee grinder or Magic Bullet)
• 2 tablespoons pure maple syrup
• a pinch of fine grain sea salt

For Topping:

• 1/2 to 1 teaspoon course grey sea salt (you can also try smoked sea salt)

Using a little coconut oil on some wax paper or a paper towel, very lightly grease a non-stick mini-muffin pan. (the muffin tin may not need to be greased, but since I didn’t use any paper liners, I didn’t want to risk the candies sticking.) You could also use a silicon candy mold. Set the pan aside. Melt the dark chocolate with the coconut oil (or your chocolate chips), either very carefully in a double boiler setup on the stove top or in small increments in the microwave. After the chocolate and coconut oil is melted, whisked together and well combined, remove from the heat (if you melted it on the stove), and add in the maple syrup. Stir well to combine. Give the chocolate topping a little taste to see if you want it any sweeter. Add more syrup, if you wish.

Using about half of the melted chocolate, add a little bit to each cup of your mini-muffin tin. Probably about a teaspoon or so to start. Grabbing either side of the tin, swirl the pan around to start moving the chocolate up the sides of each cup. Try to get it all the way up if you can. You can also use a pastry brush or spoon to push it up the sides, but I find just swirling it around works best. You can also line each cup with a paper mini-muffin liner and just paint the melted chocolate up the sides. Once it is evenly up the sides, you can add a little more chocolate to make sure that the bottom is covered, just don’t add too much, you need to save room for the filling and top.

Place the muffin tin into the freezer to allow the chocolate to set. Meanwhile, start making your filling. Add the almond butter, ground chia seeds, maple syrup and a pinch of sea salt to a small bowl. Mix very well to combine and allow it to sit about 5 to 10 minutes while the chocolate sets up in the freezer.

Once the chocolate has hardened, pull the muffin tin out of the freezer and add about 1 teaspoon of almond butter filling to each cup. Then take the remaining melted chocolate and spread it over top of the almond butter. I find using the back of a spoon is the easiest to give it a nice smooth surface. And if you are adding the sea salt on top, sprinkle a few pieces on top of each cup. Place the muffin tin back into the freezer to allow the chocolate to harden. This will probably only take about 30-minutes, total.
Once hardened, remove the muffin tin from the freezer and carefully pop or slide each chocolate mini-cup from the tin. Should happen very easily. Store these in the fridge or they will get pretty soft and melted.

* NOTE about sweeteners: You can use whatever sweetener of your choice and as much as you would like. Traditional sugar will obviously work if that’s your thing, as would honey or other sugar alternatives. Use what you like. Everyone likes their chocolate at different sweetness levels. I prefer mine not too overly sweet. As mentioned above, you could also just melt semi-sweet chocolate chips that are already sweetened and skip adding your own sweetener and coconut oil. Same goes for sweetness in the almond butter filling.

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