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served on Original Rice Cakes
That’s right. Salted vanilla peanut cacao spread.
It’s important in the life of a snacker to have a collection of condiments and spreads so vast you’ll never get bored. Or this is what we tell ourselves when we go hunting in the pantry for our precious salted vanilla peanut cacao spread. Everybody’s favorite ingredients—vanilla, peanuts and cacao—mixed together into a spread and there is nothing not to love about this fact.
This brilliant spread has the smooth, spreadable texture of peanut butter, but a rich, chocolaty flavor that we have to admit—tastes like frosting. The jar beside our keyboard as we speak won’t last too long. Homemade! Delicious! It whispers. Vegan! 100% Pure! We almost forgot one: Gluten-free! There’s a lot going on here. But this is a chocolate spread, people, made with powdered sugar. If you want health food, sub with maple syrup.
At first, we treated it like Nutiva (a healthier, vegan cousin of Nutella), spreading it on rice cakes and dipping apples in it because apparently we are still 8-year olds watching SpongeBob SquarePants after school. Then we graduated to eating it straight from the Mason jar in moments of need. But there’s so much more you can do.
Actual cooking-wise, you can have a lot of fun playing with it in all of your favorite desserts. We make tahini hot chocolate with it (have you ever tried it? You need to try it!). Warm up your milk of choice with this spread and boom, salty vanilla PB cocoa is born.
Dollop it into your next banana bread batter or make PB chocolate cookies. Note that because the peanut cacao spread has added sugar in it, when you add it in any recipe, you’ll want to decrease the amount of sugar elsewhere to balance the sweetness.
So look into your crowded pantry—is that a tiny void between the buckwheat flour and dried persimmon? We know just the thing that can fit in there.
One lick and you will be in peanut butter cacao cabana heaven.
This spread is:
〰 Creamy
〰 Chocolaty
〰 Perfectly sweet
〰 Super easy to make
〰 Little salty
〰 100% shareable
Begging to be spread on anything and everything in your house. People and furniture included.
INGREDIENTS
PRE-PREP
Combine peanuts and water into a bowl. Water level should be about half an inch over peanuts. Soak overnight. In the morning most of the water should have been absorbed by the peanuts. Drain remaining water.
PREPARATION
1. Preheat oven to 250 degrees F. Layer peanuts on a baking sheet and roast for about half an hour.
2. Place roasted peanuts in the food processor and blend until creamy and smooth, scraping sides down as needed. If it’s having trouble processing, you can add a bit of neutral oil (such as peanut oil) or if you want to keep this spread healthy-ish, then add 2 TSPs of water instead. It shouldn’t take more than 8-10 minutes.
3. Add salt, vanilla extract, sugar, melted cacao butter and pulse a few times to combine.
4. Transfer to a jar or container and keep at room temperature for up to several weeks.
NOTES
If you can’t find unsalted peanuts, simply use lightly salted or salted and don’t add any additional salt to the spread itself. Just know that salted peanuts may yield an overly-salted mixture.
PRO TIP: If you are craving crunchy, lightly salted oven roasted peanuts, then with this recipe you can fill two needs with one deed. Not only are they a great snack, these peanuts make amazing gifts too (nudge nudge Christmas nudge nudge). One of our favorite ways to enjoy peanuts is by roasting them. Combine peanuts, salt and water into a bowl and let them soak for 8 hours. Pre-heat oven to 250 F.
Layer peanuts on a baking sheet and roast for about an hour until most of the water dries off but peanuts are still chewy. Increase temperature to 300 and continue to roast for another 30 minutes or until the desired crunch is attained. Remove from the oven and let cool completely. To peel your peanuts, rub them between your palms several times. Enjoy right away or store in an airtight container for later use.
CACAO POWDER
The beans are processed at low temperatures and are considered raw. Once milled into powder, it contains a much higher amount of enzymes, minerals, and nutrients. That’s cacao powder. It tastes more bitter than cocoa powder but offers more nutritional content and is considered more natural.
COCOA POWDER
Cocoa powder, on the other hand, is created when the beans are processed at a much higher temperature. The beans are not only fermented but also roasted (cacao powder only involves fermentation). Without further processing, the cocoa is naturally acidic in taste. The finely ground and sifted product is sold as “natural cocoa”. Compared to cacao power, a tradeoff is that it may lack in the nutrients due to the additional heating.
Did you make this recipe? We get crazy excited when you make our recipes and we always love to see how they turn out.
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Lentils in the morning, lentils in the evening, lentils at suppertime. We stan lentils over here at Smartbite Snacks. What’s not to love? They're cheap, relatively quick-cooking, packed with protein, and cute as hell. And, to top it all off, they're an essential component of one of our all-time favorite food categories: The Soup Group.
The soup weather is here to stay for a while and nothing makes us crave soup like a little bit of rain and little bit of freezing temperatures. Red lentils are your mush-town friends when you crave that fall-apart texture when you’re making that thick, full of chunks and flavor coconut-y + mushroom-y lentil and tomato curry. Oh, hell yeah. It’s starting to smell like soup.
