Peppermint brittle choc hearts were born out of desire. Have you lamented the passing of your peppermint crisp addiction every beautiful day of your real food journey? I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t missed them with a slight pang of longing every now and then. BUT, such is my commitment and understanding of real food that the retail chocolate bar category is just not for me, and so… Over the years, I’ve done quite a few chocolate bar variants.
I can’t wait until you guys try them.
Tag me at @lowtoxlife #lowtoxlife so I can see what shapes and sizes you create.
Real Treats. Happy Bodies
Peppermint Brittle Choc Hearts Recipe
Ingredients
For the ‘crisp’ minty brittle part
- 100 ml rice malt syrup
- 25 g salted butter
- 1 tsp vanilla bean powder (optional but awesome. must be the powder as it will need to be dry. available easily online with a quick google)
- 4 drops 100% pure TGA and FSANZ listed peppermint oil (don’t muck around with oils in recipes that aren’t listed with compliant labelling to be consumed in cooking. I’ve popped an essential oil note down the bottom)
For the chocolatey part
- 70 g coconut oil
- 30 g dutch processed or raw cacao
- 30 g rice malt syrup (or maple or honey)
- 2 drops peppermint oil
You will need the following:
- 1 pot to melt your chocolate (or you can thermomix it)
- 1 pc silicone mould ensure you buy a good brand and get 100% pure silicon, to avoid plastic contamination – basically, stay away from $2 shop type ‘silicon’ which is rarely 100% silicon. I like to shop for silicon moulds at Chef’s Warehouse, a professional hospitality shop with a big patissier section at the back with tins and moulds of all shapes and sizes.
- 1 pc parchment paper
- 1 unit tray to cool the toffee
Instructions
- Have a sheet of parchment ready, for a quick turn out of the toffee.
- Melt your butter in a medium heat cast iron or stainless steel frying pan.
- Add your rice syrup and stir them together until combined and bubbling.
- Let the rice syrup and butter bubble away slowly together for 8-10 minutes on medium heat or thereabouts depending of course on your stove heat and pan thickness. Not enough means it will not crisp up, and too much means you will burn it. Basically, as soon as you detect a change to a darker golden colour and get that whiff of intensified caramel, get it onto the baking sheet pronto.
- Leave on a baking sheet to harden as it completely cools down. I use ‘If YOU Care’ brand parchment paper. Great stuff. Did you know the white mainstream stuff is lined with a paraffin (petroleum) wax to make it ‘non stick’? No thank you!
- Anyway, back to the positives… Brittle toffee in the cooling phase.
While you’re waiting for the brittle to cool
- In a little pot, melt your coconut oil and whisk or stir in chocolate powder, syrup and another drop of peppermint oil.
- Leave to cool to room temp too otherwise the toffee won’t stay crunchy!
- So, basically, leave both of the elements of the treat now cooling for 10 mins or so.
- Once totally cool and brittle, break shards of the brittle up into a whizz bang blitzer type of thing. YOU WANT CHUNKY NUGGETS, NOT A FINE POWDER, SO LITERALLY 1-2 SECONDS TOPS or a couple of pulses. You could also chop roughly with a sharp knife.
- Then get your moulds or a little bowl lined with parchment paper and pour in your chocolate. Then take a couple of pinches of brittle bits and drop into each heart if you have a mould, or drop about 3/4 of the brittle bits into the bowl of chocolate.
- What to do with any left over ‘brittle’? A good problem to have. Follow along the lines of my I Can’t Believe it’s Not MILO recipe and just mix in an equal part to what you’ve got left of cocoa powder and a pinch of vanilla bean powder, and dump into the hot milk of your choice for a delicious, chocolatey, malty cup of goodness.
- Cool in the freezer until hard and then take out and enjoy straight from the freezer.
Essential Oils Safety
There are some great oils out there for diffusing – Young Living, Twenty8, Doterra, Springfields… Please be careful though when selecting an oil for cooking with, that it has gone through the proper channels to be compliantly labeled and listed, to be used in cooking / ingested that way – if you buy your oils from a rep just give them a buzz for peace of mind. This will mean it has been tested rigorously to be deemed safe and pure. Oils can be contaminated by the way they’re distilled or along other parts of the production process, and I don’t recommend using oils that don’t clearly state their compliant usages, if you’re preparing recipes with them. I love the Young Living oils because they control everything from their soil, farming, distilling through to bottling and shipping, so it’s not a case of ‘buying oil on the open market and popping a pretty label on it”. If you want to join our oily group and get a wholesale account, feel free to email me [email protected] or jump onto https://www.youngliving.com/en_AU and pop in my sponsor / enroller number 2450874 – Just let me know when you have if you do, so that I can pop you into our private FB group. Don’t email if you’re looking for an ‘oily internet doctor’ group though. It shocks many to discover that in Australia we aren’t legally allowed to talk about healing and treating diseases or ailments with oils outside of the aromatherapy practitioner’s office, yet many do. I prefer to focus on mood, concentration, energy, stamina, pick me ups, stress, DIY beauty, bath and cleaning, love, happy kids, meditation, chakras and recipes, yummy smelling perfume-like blending and that kind of talk, not curing cancer! Curing and treating when not a practitioner with potent pure oils that are very intensive on the liver – well, it just feels irresponsible. We have fun. Zero stress or pressure. You’ll never get a call from me asking you to start a business or any of that jazz… Just a bunch of oily appreciation chats. If you’ve got some peppermint oil already at home from whatever company, just send them an email or check their website for FSANZ approval for reassurance. Here’s Young Living’s list of oils that are compliant with labelling requirements and able to be used in small amounts in food and beverage recipes <3
Comments 2
Hi Alex,
As promised I am trialling a dairy free version of your Peppermint Crisp! I subbed the butter for coconut oil when making the toffee to do this. Still worked, and still tastes delicious (who can wait for it to set in the chocolates molds?!). My advice to others making it dairy free is to either omit the coconut oil, or reduce down to approx. 10g as I ended up draining some off the toffee once it had set.
Thanks for the awesome recipe! It will become a staple here!
Katie 🙂
Katie I’m so glad you love them and that it worked – thanks so much for the feedback on the dairy free version x