Raw salted lavender chocolates

I am a firm believer of the notion that one can never have too many chocolate-based recipes. Particularly ones that can be whipped up quicker than you can utter the words “honey, where are the car keys? I’m gonna to pop to the shop and get some chocolate”. And then subsequently drive to the shop, pick out the chocolate, purchase said chocolate, and drive home. (We live around the corner from the nearest store, so this is actually quite a quick excursion!)

Yes – these will be melting away in your hungry little mouth quicker than you can you can do all of that.

These came about when I initially started experimenting with raw chocolate at Easter time, and playing around with the best way to flavour and sweeten the raw chocolate mixture. I used various liquid sweeteners – honey, maple syrup and rice bran syrup – when playing around with the Easter Egg recipes, but I wanted to try chocolate made with no added sweeteners. They needed something though to sweeten them slightly, and the obvious choice was dates – so dates it was. And the lavender I had picked a while back and added to a batch of cookies, but there were two branches left over begging to be turned into something more spectacular… Which I can happily say they were.

The pictures here aren’t fantastic to be honest which is why it’s taken me so long to post this recipe. We’ve just experienced the shortest day of the year here and as such it’s pitch black dark when I leave home and return in the evenings, which only allows a few hours of sunshine a week to take photos. 

And it’s not so much that I’m a perfectionist when it comes to this kind of thing – though I did slice through my finger the other day trying to core a pear while still keeping the whole thing in tact to photograph… the perils of a food photographer! – it’s more to do with the fact that I would whip up another batch, pop them in the freezer, and then by the time I would go to get them a few days later to photograph they would be all but gone… I blame the dog…