Quirky Cooking's walnut & raw cacao nib bliss balls

Walnut Almond and Macadamia raw cacao nib bliss balls

These bliss balls have to be among the best I have ever made! They are like truffles, they are so rich and tasty.

I had a container of raw cacao nibs in my pantry, and they have been there for so long I can't remember what I got them for. I know I got them after my Thermomix, so less than 10 months, so they are still good to use.

I happened to see this recipe come up in my newsfeed on Facebook yesterday, so I shared it to my wall, meaning to make it in the afternoon. But then cocktails happened, and the bliss balls didn't! Oops!

So this afternoon I decided to give them a go before I forgot about the recipe. The picture of them on the Quirky cooking website looked delicious. If you would like to give them a go yourself, you can find the link here.

Since I have just started following a primal style diet this week (I have cut out most grains - still using a little rice flour, and still having full fat dairy), I have been on the lookout for portable snacks. I have a pile of bliss balls in the freezer but I was getting a bit bored of the same flavour.

I had a whole pile of different nuts in the pantry - everything but walnuts! So I decided to make them with almonds a handful of macadamias.

Raw cacao nibs

The power of the Thermomix is clear in the recipe - raw cacao nibs are pretty hard little things, and in 20 seconds the Thermomix makes them into quite a fine powder. Once the raw cacao was milled, I added in the dates, but I strayed from the recipe and just threw everything else in and did the final 1 minute blitz. It didn't seem to make much difference, they still came together just fine. There was no particular reason I did this, other than I wasn't paying attention to the recipe so much as the ingredient list.

Milled cacao nibs

After the one minute of blending everything together, its just a matter of rolling them into balls. I find this quite therapeutic! It surprised me how oily the mix is at the end. The high speed blending for 1 minute warms the ingredients up, even though no temperature is set, so this helps the cacao to release the cacao butter. It makes a lovely moist bliss ball! I really liked the vanilla flavour in it. It would be quite nice to do peppermint ones, with some peppermint oil or even rum flavoured ones for Christmas instead of the traditional rum balls.

Mixture before rolling

Who knew I could talk for so long about a simple bliss ball!

Happy thermomixing!