Cooking with Klara: Fudge Babies

Fudge Babies – just the name sounds incredibly delicious, right? Like a little bite of fudgey heaven. Unfortunately, this tale turns out a bit differently. Most Cooking with Klaras bring you delicious recipes to replicate and enjoy. This one will provide a sad story of a possibly amazing (and healthy) dessert with a lot less bite than it’s bark. But for those who are determined to make healthy desserts for their kids and think they can replicate the recipe better, I will share the adventure.

“On one fateful evening, I came across a blog dedicated to healthy, and delicious tasting, desserts. The Raven cawed twice and I knew it was meant to be. The delicious chocolate and me…” Okay, you get the idea, I’ll just cut to the recipe :)

Ingredients

1 Cup Walnuts

1 and 1/3 Cup Pitted Dates (We used Jewel brand…maybe this was the problem?)

1 tsp Vanilla Extract

3-4 Tbs Cocoa Powder (Original recipe didn’t specify so we used unsweetened cocoa…perhaps sweetened cocoa would have been better in hindsight)

1/8 tsp Salt (optional)

Directions

These directions are super easy, which is why I was drawn to this recipe. You let the little ones throw all the ingredients into a food processor or a magic bullet, and you let the magic happen! Although, after doing this and failing once, I would suggest simply grinding up the dates first. Abs and I had to redo this part – clearly the Magic Bullet was not made for baby makin’ :)

Once everything is ground up, simply take small chunks of the mixture and make little balls. You can use seran wrap if you don’t want your fingers to get pruney (pun intended), but I think just using your hands is much more fun for the little ones who don’t mind getting a little messy (and let’s admit, that’s the vast majority).

Okay, so sounds like a great, perfect, healthy recipe, right? In theory, yes. In practice, no. Our fudge babies tasted more or less like bitter prunes. I don’t know what we did wrong, because on the blog I got this recipe from (Chocolate Covered Katie), everybody raved about them. I would like to blame it on the 2 year old, but considering I was the one that measured everything, and she hid in the staircase while the Magic Bullet was going, I really don’t think I can do it on this one. Ah, perhaps I will try again at another point in time. But for now, Abby and I are steering clear of dates. We’ll stick with our chocolate milk and cupcakes, thank you :)