Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Dessert Hummus

I've been (morbidly) intrigued with the whole dessert hummus thing ever since it took the food blog world by storm.  If you Google "dessert hummus" you get dozens of different recipes and variations.  As near as I can tell, it originated with the very talented Evan at The Wannabe Chef.  I used his recipe as a base, and tweaked it a bit to suit my own tastes.

I was incredibly skeptical about this.  While I love hummus, I didn't really believe it could be made into a decent dessert.  It's an appetizer; it's a great snack; it's a fantastic sandwich spread, but beans for dessert just doesn't even sound that appetizing.  I couldn't imagine it being good.  I was SO WRONG.  This stuff rocks my socks.  I actually used my finger to get every last bit out of the food processor.


Usually desserts aren't the healthiest things in the world, but sometimes you can find a dessert that is at least not bad for you.  This is not only not bad for you, it's actually GOOD for you!  Chickpeas are low fat, low cholesterol, high fiber, high protein, and an excellent source of folate and zinc.  They may also assist in lowering cholesterol in the bloodstream.  Natural peanut butter is low in cholesterol and is a good source of niacin and manganese.  It's a good source of protein and is full of mono and poly-unsaturated fats, or the good fats that help lower cholesterol and have heart-protective benefits, and here's an entire article about the health benefits of pure maple syrup.  So yay!  An actual healthy dessert.  I'm so excited.

Apple Nachos

There are recipes for apple nachos all over the internet.  I love apples, and I love them even more now that it's Honeycrisp season, so apple nachos seemed to be just the ticket, but so many of the recipes are soooo unhealthy. I mean come on! Marshmallows? An entire stick of butter? Caramel sauce? Commercial chocolate syrup? Do you have any idea what's even in that sticky, sweet, processed chocolate stuff? I'll give you a hint: high fructose corn syrup is the number one ingredient in the grand majority of them. This is a snack that has such potential to be healthy, so I decided to health it up. I had mine for dinner last night! This recipe is for a single serving, so feel free to up it and make more. Had I done that, I would have eaten the whole thing!

Honey Roasted Cinnamon Peanut Butter

My nut butters are usually very simple, one ingredient kinda things.  Generally I use just nuts, either dry roasted or raw, no added salt or sugar or oil of any kind.  It's absolutely amazing this way.  You get the taste of the actual nut without all of the added sodium and fat and calories that really do nothing to enhance the flavor anyway.

Every now and then, though, I like a treat just as much as the next person.  While surfing the web one dreary morning, I came across an ad for Naturally Nutty Honey Roasted Cinnamon Peanut Butter.  It set off an almost immediate craving.  I've never seen Naturally Nutty brand around here in the stores, and ordering it from their website wouldn't have fulfilled my sudden need for instant gratification.  Then there was the whole issue of the fact that I'm ummmm frugal, and I wasn't about to pay five bucks (plus shipping!) for a mere eight ounces of peanut butter.  Hmmmm, a little light bulb went off in my head.  "I'll bet I can make this." I checked my cabinets and was thrilled to discover that I had all the ingredients needed to make this new yummy concoction that I now absolutely had to have!  It was easy as pie, too.  Though I don't know who made up that expression, because I think pie is all kinds of hard.  I've never made a pie crust in my life that was worth eating.  But as usual, I digress, so back to the goodness that is this peanut butter.

How to Make Your Own Nut Butters

Making your own nut butter is far more healthy than than buying the typical jar of Jif at the grocery store, and it's far more economical than buying natural nut butters at health stores, or even at the grocery store if you're lucky enough to have a grocery store that sells natural nut butters.

The Jif website tells me that their peanut butter contains roasted peanuts, sugar, molasses, fully hydrogenated vegetable oils (rapeseed and soybean), mono and diglycerides, and a metric crap-ton of salt.  Nut butters don't need any of that added stuff.  I don't even know what rapeseed oil is, and I have no idea why I'd want to consume anything that provides 150mg of sodium per serving.  The beauty of making it yourself is that you don't have to have any of that extra stuff, and if you want to sweeten it you can pick something way healthier than refined white sugar with which to do it--agave nectar, honey, maple syrup, etc.

Nut butter is fabulously healthy.  It contains fiber and essential fatty acids. It contains good quality, usable protein, without any cholesterol.  Nuts lower the risk of type II diabetes.  There are all kinds of benefits.  If you want to read further on the subject, here is a good place to start.

You can fancy up your nut butters, as well and make gourmet flavors.  Add a couple of tablespoons of cocoa powder to hazelnut butter for home made Nutella.  Add a sprinkle of cinnamon and a splash of vanilla to your almond butter.  Add a drizzle of honey to your sunflower seed butter.  Add a very ripe banana to your peanut butter.  Go where your imagination takes you.  I'm getting ahead of myself here though.  First the how to. 

All you need is a food processor and your nut of choice.  Many sites on the web will tell you that you've got to add oil to make your nut butter creamy, but this simply isn't so.  All it takes is a little bit of patience.  I made peanut butter for this how to.  I generally buy my nuts in bulk and raw.  This saves tons of money.  However, these particular peanuts came dry roasted, unsalted, and in a jar.  They were on sale for far to cheap for me to resist.  You can roast your nuts first, buy them roasted, or make raw nut butters, which are also amazing.  In fact, I prefer my almond butter to be raw.

1.  Put about two cups of your nut of choice in the food processor.  I've used peanuts, sunflower seeds, pecans, almonds, and cashews, and they've all resulted in fabulous nut butters.  My absolute favorite is the sunflower seed.

2.  Turn the food processor on high, and cover your ears, because the beginning of this process is really loud.  The nuts will break down into a flour like consistency.

2.  Turn off the food processor and scrape down the sides.  Depending on the motor strength of your processor, you may want to rest it.  This is where the patience thing comes in.  You don't need to add any oil at all.  You just need to processes and rest, process and rest until the nuts begin to release their own natural oils.  This could take anywhere from a few minutes to 20 of them, depending on the strength of your food processor.

3.  The level of creaminess is personal preference.  The picture below is still a bit too grainy for my tastes.  I like my nut butters to be very smooth.  I also like to process them until they are pretty thin.  In this case, that's because I'm going to use this in Sesame Peanut Noodles.  I also like to process it somewhat thin, because you've got to store it in the refrigerator.  I don't know about you guys, but I don't have the patience to bring something to room temperature before I spread it, so I want it to come out of the fridge already spreadable.

This is still too thick and grainy for me, so I'm going to give it a few more minutes in the food processor.

4.  Once you've reached your desired smoothness and consistency, store in an airtight container in the refrigerator.  It lasts for a couple of weeks, at least.

Now it's getting there.

Perfect!

Enjoy!