Orange Cocoa Balls

You're a tough crowd you lot. I'm very excited about some of the sugar alternatives I wrote about recently, but wasn't greeted with a long list of rapturous responses. Being mostly Kiwis, I'm thinking you're probably just excited on the inside. So. Keep up the excitement everyone...

The challenge with many of these sugar alternatives is how to swap them for sugar when a simple straight swap won't work. I see my experimenting with them in two ways. 1. -  using them in new and different kinds of recipes where other people have done the hard work or swapping in the new ingredient is an easy swap, and 2. - fiddling around with favourite, standard recipes to include the new ingredient but still getting the consistency right.


Today's recipe is something I haven't really made before, and is an easy swap - it uses rice syrup instead of honey, and I've made a couple of other small adjustments.

Do you like what my new macro lens can do? I know the white is a little blown out, KH probably wouldn't have let that one pass.

A friend of mine brought an evening snack round recently and told me they were called "Energy Balls" and weren't really that exciting. Brilliant! Is that how people think of me now? No, I'm sure you don't, and I thought it was hilarious, and also fairly accurate. BUT, we don't always have to be eating double chocolate cream balls or something, and these have their place in life. I actually find them quite good for a mid afternoon snack.

I took out the dried fruit from the original recipe (as it's loaded with fructose) and added some orange zest and cocoa powder. There is some orange juice, which is also fructose laden, but it's barely a drop, especially when spread across each serving. I'm quite keen to get my hands on some cocoa nibs actually, and they would be great in here.

Orange Cocoa Balls 

1 cup ground almonds

2/3 cup rolled oats

3 Tablespoons rice syrup (or honey).

1/4 cup orange juice (approx half an orange)

1 Tablespoon cocoa

Grated zest of half an orange

1/2 cup dessicated coconut

(shake of chia seeds optional)

Simply mix together and roll in to balls. Roll in extra coconut, or in cocoa powder, or half in each.

(For half of the above recipe I used 1 tablespoon cocoa and 1 scoop (ie tiny pinch) of stevia

Here's the update to Orange Cocoa Balls:

Post Script: For those who don't use ground almonds, you can substitute it with "oatmeal" - ground up rolled oats that you can make at home with a food processor or mini chopper. One of our readers, Frank, has made this recipe and used a combo of walnut, almond, linseed and pumpkin seed, and suggests that if you need to avoid nuts you could use ground seeds only. Thanks Frank!

If you'd like your cocoa balls to be a little sweeter, try adding a couple of tablespoons of glucose (remove 2 tablespoons of ground almonds/oatmeal).

I've tried adding coca nibs too, and the jury is still out on these. They add a bit of crunch, but not an exciting flavour (you can't fool yourself that you are eating chocolate). They're certainly good for you though.