Still Feeling Peckish

Chocolate makes everything good. Actually not all chocolate makes everything good…I confess that I’m a little persnickety about the kind of chocolate I put into my desserts…gone are the childhood days where we used to use Van Houten’s cocoa powder and baking chocolate that I remember tasting much like plastic.

I recently asked kid#2 what she can’t do without on a low carb diet and she immediately said chocolate. She keeps a stash of sugar-free chocolate in her room and I do know that when she has an exam coming up that I get sent to buy chocolate more frequently. Kid#1 isn’t quite as avid about chocolate and I suspect it was because he had multiple food allergies when he was little and his lack of exposure to dairy products resulted in him not being fond of chocolate desserts. So in the family it is only kid#2 and I who are self-avowed chocolate monsters.

Recently I’ve been trying to make some really simple desserts. I’ve had some friends who wanted to go on a low carb diet but weren’t really home cooks, so I was trying to help them to manage their cravings for sweets by having some easy LC dessert and snack options. Friend M has a low carb range of products (www.benbanter.com) and one of the products is a low carb granola. I confess I have never been a great fan of breakfast cereals, having been brought up on Asian type breakfasts like congee, noodles or kaya toast. But it’s only been recently that I’ve really started to fall in love with the product which to me is like a little treasure hunt of nice surprises like strips of coconut or almonds.

So I figured it would be really fun to incorporate the granola into a chocolate dessert. I made these chocolate-peanut butter-granola clusters which were fantastic because this little dessert was enough to satisfy my need for something sweet to end off the meal. Each serving is about 6 g carbs, but is like a little fun energy bomb – just one of these is satisfying enough for any chocolate monster’s cravings.