Thursday, June 17, 2010

Avocado and Chocolate Experimentin'

This post on Veggie Wedgie's blog really piqued my interest. When faced with a bag of 5 large avocados at Costco, I knew what I had to do. I'm not sure what size her avocados in Greece were so I just ended up using 2 large ones and playing with the other ingredients until it tasted "right" (I started with half of all the other ingredients, but added more). I just used Valrhona cocoa powder since I didn't have the raw cocao powder called for in the recipe.
Now if this project didn't painfully illustrate my "need" for a Vitamix blender, I don't know what else would. Took a while to get the thick mixture to blend completely in my antique, but finally, one ozone-filled kitchen later, it happened...with the aid of a spatula of course.
My mom just happened to bring me a whole slew of liquor from my grandmother's old house.
This merited an experiment! Not all of the booze is what I would deem viable...who knows how long it sat in her cupboards. The Chambord that I thought would be a winner, smelled way too reminiscent of cherry cough syrup to bother with. The pear liqueur was quite lovely though, so it went into one of the trials. The Monster has a nice bottle of Ginger liqueur that I thought might work nicely with chocolate...in it went. I think I added sea salt flakes to each of the 3 that I altered. It deepened and rounded out the flavors nicely. Had to add vanilla to one of them too. I did make one sample straight up for comparison's sake.
Here's the breakdown:

Green- straight initial recipe ingredients...avocado, unsweetened cocoa powder, agave nectar, water (although I had to play with amounts)
Pink- ~1/4 tsp vanilla extract and a pinch of sea salt flakes
Yellow- ~1/2 tsp pear liqueur added to the vanilla-sea salt batch
Orange- ~1/2+ tsp ginger liqueur + a pinch of sea salt flakes

Who knows what will come out of the freezer in 8 hours...will update with our findings!

3 comments:

veggie wedgie said...

Ginger and salt also sounds like a great combo! Your Popsicles look delish, glad you tried it!

Erndog said...

Thanks for an amazing base recipe V.W! I was just eating lunch at a raw food restaurant in Austin today and both the waitress and the woman sitting next to us overheard me talking about the pops and got very excited about getting the recipe. :-)
Hope they try it!
~Erin

veggie wedgie said...

Haha tha's funny! It's nice and crazy to think that somewhere far away from where I am was talking about my recipes! thank you :)