Learn how easy it is to make homemade chocolate with only 3 essential ingredients needed: cocoa butter, cocoa powder and a sweetener of your choice. You can easily make this chocolate vegan, low carb and paleo friendly by choosing the right sweetener for you!
What is cocoa butter?
Cocoa butter is the edible fat extracted from, you guess it: cacao beans. It’s got a naturally chocolatey smell and taste making it a perfect addition to homemade chocolate. Despite the name, cocoa butter is naturally dairy free/vegan so don’t worry about the ‘butter’ in the name.
It’s typically sold in solid, block-like form that you’ll need to chop up to melt. I recommend using a kitchen scale to measure out what you need otherwise it might be too tedious to melt and then measure.
Cocoa butter can be hard to find and very expensive which is why I don’t often use it in recipes. Since I got so many questions about how to make homemade dark chocolate in my other chocolate recipe I thought I’d take the time to dedicate a separate recipe here explaining exactly how to use it.
So let’s get to it!
Cocoa Vs Cacao
Cocoa and cacao are so similar in name, look and product that they can so easily be mixed up. That being said there are a few key differences to know that will help keep it all straight:
| CACAO | COCOA |
| cacao refers to the name of the plant/seeds and the minimally processed products that are derived from it | cocoa refers to all of the products that come from cacao plants that have been processed in high temps |
| cold pressed & heated in low temperatures – raw | roasted & cooked in higher temperatures – not raw |
| less processed – more bitter | more processed – more sweet |
| high antioxidants & nutritional value | less antioxidants & nutritional value |
What should I use here?
Whatever you have! Cacao powder/butter, cocoa butter/powder, unprocessed cocoa powder, dutch processed cocoa powder, etc.
The type of cocoa/cacao that you use in this recipe really only depends on you and your preference. Use cacao products if you’d like to make raw chocolate with a few extra health benefits. Use cocoa/dutch processed chocolate if you like your chocolate a little sweeter. They’ll all work here so don’t sweat it.
What type of sweetener can I use to make homemade chocolate?
It’s up to you! You can use more natural sweeteners like maple or honey, low carb/keto sweeteners like stevia or erythritol or even plain white caster sugar or powdered icing sugar if you prefer.
If you choose to use a coarser grain sugar like caster sugar, you will need to mix and warm the mixture longer to ensure the grains fully dissolve.
A couple things that you’ll need to keep in mind:
- You’ll need more or less sweeteners depending on the type you use.
- Honey and maple are sweeter to taste than plain white sugar and erythritol so you need less honey/maple than you would the sugar/erythritol.
- Liquid stevia is naturally very sweet – you’ll need to measure it out in drops and not cups.
- Start out with a small amount of sweetener and taste and as as you go. You can always add more sweetener but you can’t take it away.
- Make sure you fully dissolve whatever sweetener you use – especially if you’re using a granulated sweetener.
What percentage dark chocolate is this?
This is going to depend on how much and what kind of sweetener you use to make your chocolate.
Chocolate percentage refers to how much cocoa/cacao products are in your chocolate. As a really base explanation, it’s a measure of how much sugar is in a bar of chocolate.
This recipe is made up of essentially three ingredients:
- 1 cup | 220 g cocoa butter
- 1 cup | 118 g cocoa powder
- 1/4 cup | 79 g maple syrup (for this example I’m just going to use 1/4 cup maple, but this amount/type of sweetener can be changed to suit you)
The Math
If you add up all of those amounts together you’ll end up with a chocolate that weighs 417 grams. The cocoa butter and cocoa powder together in this recipe weigh 338g. In order to calculate the percentage you need to divide 338g by 417g and you’ll end up with .8105 g . Once you move the decimal point over two places as you should when calculating percentages you’ll end up with 81.05%. SO if you’re only using 1/4 cup maple syrup you’d end up with an 81% chocolate.
However, you need to keep in mind that different sweeteners weigh different amounts. 1/4 cup maple syrup weighs 79 grams but 1/4 cup honey weighs 85 grams and 1/4 cup white caster sugar weighs 50 grams. If you use something like stevia you’ll end up using much less which will also change the chocolate percentage. That’s just one reason why a 70% chocolate bar can taste so different depending on the brand.
To sum it all up the Math
It really just depends. If you use 1/4 – 1/2 cup maple or honey your chocolate will be some where between 65%-80%. If you use more or less sweetener, you can calculate the percentage yourself by adding up the weight and then dividing the weight of the cocoa products (338g) by the weight of the sweetener.
Hope you enjoy!
Homemade Chocolate with Cocoa Butter
Learn how easy it is to make homemade chocolate with only 3 essential ingredients needed: cocoa butter, cocoa powder and a sweetener of your choice. You can easily make this chocolate vegan, low carb and paleo friendly by choosing the right sweetener for you!
Ingredients
- 1 cup | 220 g cocoa butter
- 1 cup | 118 g unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1/4 - 1/2 cup | 80g - 160g maple syrup, honey, agave etc*
- Pinch of salt
Instructions
- Chop up and melt the cocoa butter. You can melt directly in a small sauce pan over a low heat or in the microwave. Once melted remove the cocoa butter from the heat. To make raw chocolate, melt the cocoa butter slowly over a water bath (see notes).
- When the cocoa butter has fully melted, stir in the cocoa powder, sweetener, sea salt and any additional flavours you want to add.
- Whisk everything completely until there are no remaining lumps of cocoa powder and the honey has dissolved into the chocolate mixture.
- Pour the chocolate into silicone moulds or a lined muffin cups and transfer to the fridge for at least 30 minutes. Once the chocolate has fully hardened, pop it out of the moulds and enjoy.
- Keep stored at room temperature or in the fridge.
Notes
- I no longer recommend adding vanilla extract (or other flavored extracts) to this chocolate as most extracts contain a small amount of water which can cause the chocolate to seize. If you would like to add flavors I recommend you use a food grade oil (like mint, orange, cherry, coffee, etc) instead.
- Melt over a water bath: Place the cocoa butter in a medium sized heat safe bowl. Place the bowl over a small pot of simmer water. Make sure the bottom of the bowl doesn't touch the water. Let sit and stir occasionally until fully melted.
- How much & what kind of sweetener to use: This recipe is meant to be a 'healthy/healthier' chocolate that uses natural or unrefined sweeteners. For this reason I recommend honey or maple syrup however you can try out different type of sweetener here like stevia, erythritol, caster sugar, etc. Just keep in mind that not all sugar is created equal - some are sweeter than others so you will need varying amounts depending on what you use. You'll need to play around with the amounts you use based on your preference. If you're not concerned about using natural sweeteners, then I recommend you use 3/4cup -1 cup icing/powdered sugar.
- If using a crystal based sweetener (rather than a liquid sweetener): Melt the cocoa butter on a very low heat and then add the sugar/sweetener. Keep on a low heat and stir constantly until the sugar dissolves. Then add the remaining ingredients.
- If it's important to you, keep in mind that honey is not vegan.
- This chocolate will melt if heated so it's not suited to use in baking.
Elizabeth says
Great recipe! Easy to make, tasty (I went with the larger amount of liquid sweetener) and sets up well. I didn’t add salt because salt isn’t an ingredient in chocolate, but I know many people like a salty twist on their desserts 🙂 I appreciate all the variation notes in case the original recipe hadn’t worked for me, but it totally did. I even found a video online for how to temper chocolate with liquid sweetener in it and used this recipe to make personalized chocolates for my union reps as a thank you. It came out great (all shiny and snappy) and they loved it. It was so much work, I don’t think I’ll be doing the whole tempering thing again, but I’m definitely doing this recipe again! Thanks for sharing it 🙂
Sarah Nevins says
Hi Elizabeth – thanks for coming back to let me know how it went 🙂 That’s great to know about tempering with liquid sweeteners as it’s a question I often get! Though I think I’d probably agree with you that it might be more work than I want to do
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts! I’m so glad you enjoyed the chocolate 🙂
Amelia says
Hi! I happened across this recipe and to my delight I had all the ingredients. It tasted really good! However I absolutely messed it up and I’m not very savvy in the kitchen to understand which of my mistakes was the culprit. I reduced the quantities. I did a 1/4 cup for the cocoa butter and 1/4 for the cocoa powder, and honestly probably 1/4 cup of the maple syrup. It was originally about 1/8 of a cup but I only had a little left in the bottle and I wanted it sweeter. I totally forgot about the salt. It was in the fridge for ages but it never hardened completely! I even stuck it in the freezer for 24 hours and it remained same consistency, which was similar to maybe really cold nutella or regular butter. Solid on the spoon but not solid enough to pop out of the silicon mold. I feel like it was the amount of maple syrup, but do you have a more educated theory? Thank you!
Sarah Nevins says
Hi Amelia! I’m glad it still tasted good even though it didn’t harden up!
I think you’re on the right about it being too much maple syrup for the amount of cocoa butter/powder. Ideally you probably would have wanted to keep the ratios similar to the original recipe – in this case it sounds like the extra maple made this more of a chocolate sauce. Tasty, but not always ideal 🙂
Since you used 1/4 cup cocoa butter and 1/4 cup cocoa powder you would have needed to reduce the maple syrup to about 1-2 tablespoons as well. If you were to try this again with the reduced amounts I might recommend you try adding powdered sugar instead of maple syrup so that you could increase the amount of sweetener without adding too much extra liquid.
Hope this helps!
William Bates says
Tempered? It does not sound like it. Zero stars for you.
Sarah Nevins says
Hi William! I don’t make any claim that this is a tempered chocolate recipe. The goal here was to share an easy recipe that people could make at home without too much fuss, but I appreciate your feedback.
Amber says
I used powdered monk fruit, but mine turned out gritty. Advice on how to make that not happen next time? Thanks!
Sarah Nevins says
Hi Amber! I don’t have any experience using monk fruit, but from what I’ve read online monk fruit powder and erythritol are a bit stubborn when it comes to dissolving in liquids which sounds like it could be the problem here if the chocolate was gritty.
From what I’ve seen you can dissolve it, but it just takes a bit more time of warming everything over a low heat. If it were me, I would trying mixing and melting the coconut butter and monk fruit powder together first. Once the monk fruit has totally dissolved, then add the remaining ingredients.
I hope this helps!
Krista Hatch says
Can I add sweetened condensed milk to make it milk chocolate? If so, how do I do that?
Sarah Nevins says
Hi Krista! Milk powder is the best thing to add to get milk chocolate.
How much you need to add depends on how much sweetener you plan on using. I recommend at least adding 1/2 cup (65 grams) of milk powder to get a milk chocolate. The way to figure out the percentage is to add up the weight of the cocoa powder and cocoa butter by the total weight of all ingredients.
(cocoa powder + coco butter) ÷ (total weight of all ingredients) = .xxxx or x%
So let’s say you use 1/4 cup maple syrup (79g) – you’ll probably use more than this.
Cocoa powder + cocoa butter = 338g
combined ingredients = 482g
338 ÷ 482 = .7012 or 70%
70% and below is usually considered milk chocolate. As long as you use more than 1/4 cup maple or honey or add an extra tablespoon or so of milk powder you should end up with a milk chocolate.
I hope this makes sense and is helpful!
Krista Hatch says
Thanks so much! Can I use powdered sugar instead of maple syrup? I worry about the chocolate seizing if I pour in liquid sweetener.
Sarah Nevins says
Absolutely! The only thing to keep in mind is that maple is much sweeter tasting that powdered sugar so you’ll probably want to double the amount of powdered sugar you use – in this case I think 1 cup would be a good idea
Nicky Fischer says
Hello, can i substitute using carob powder instead of cocoa? Will cacoa butter cause insomnia just as dark chocolate does? How long can i keep home made chocolate made with carob and cacoa butter? Many thanks
Sarah Nevins says
Hi Nicky – Thanks for your question! You’ve given me something new to research and test out. At the moment I don’t have much experience using carob powder so I can’t give you any definite answers. Having looked into it a bit it seems like you can substitute cocoa powder for carob as a 1:1 substitute. However, the problem you may run into is that carob has a stronger, more bitter flavor than cocoa. Usually it’s recommended to use less carob to accommodate for the difference.
If you were to use the same amount of carob it’s likely to come out too bitter, but if you reduce the amount I worry the chocolate wouldn’t set with a different ratio of wet to dry ingredients. I haven’t tried this myself so I can’t guarantee it would work, but if I were to try it myself I would reduce the amount of carob to 3/4 cup and then add 1/4 cup icing sugar to make up for the difference in volume and balance out the bitter flavor.
Again, I haven’t done this so take it with a grain of salt! Sorry I can’t be more help, but I’d hate to steer you wrong with bad advice!