Fruit & Nut Bars

After a brief break from my chocolate study, in pursuit of other kitchen adventures (like Oven Porcupines and Cranberry Orange Muffins), I decided it was time to get back to it. This week's endeavour: transform the remains of a delicious milk chocolate Easter bunny.

Now, you may be wondering why one would want to transform an Easter bunny instead of just eating the Easter bunny. That's a fair question. The bunny was mostly solid and quite thick, so biting into it felt like it might damage the teeth. Instead, I found myself attacking it in rather gruesome fashion to chop it into more manageable pieces. I decided the best thing to do would be to melt it down and turn it into something else, like chocolate bark. And that's when I started thinking about some inclusions I had on hand in my chocolate stash. 

Over the years, I've experimented with a variety of freeze-dried fruits and berries. Most commonly, I've ground them into a powder and used them to create truffles and other chocolates, but I've always wondered what they would be like used whole or chopped into pieces. Would the texture be too dry and unpleasant? Would it be chewy or sticky? Could it be used to create a naked chocolate bar in the same way that dried fruit is? There was only one way to find out. 

I took a knife to the bunny and chopped it into small pieces. The milk chocolate chunks weighed 130g. Now, that's a very small amount of chocolate to work with and almost impossible to temper, but I decided not to add callets because I didn't want to waste ingredients if the experiment failed. With the chocolate prepared using the direct tempering method, I added about 8g of freeze dried blueberries and about 15g of chopped walnuts. I stirred them in and then poured the chocolate to a silicone bar mold. I had enough to make four small bars. I popped them into the fridge for 15 minutes and once they were set, I unmolded them. 

The result? Four tasty chocolate bars. While they have some of the characteristic shine of well-tempered chocolate, they also have a bit of a mottled finish as a result of using a silicone mold that can't be polished in the same way that polycarbonate molds can. Since these are a test, that doesn't bother me. The focus of this week's experiment, after all, is texture. 

I'm quite surprised to report that the freeze dried fruit is delicious in this application. As hard as it is to believe, I wasn't really able to tell that the blueberries were freeze dried. They had a bit of a chew, but not unpleasant, and they weren't dry or chalky at all. My fear that they would be unpalatable was unfounded.  

Fruit and nut is a classic combination. And using freeze dried fruit and berries is definitely worthy of further experimentation, particularly in chocolate bark. 

What fruit and nut combo would you like to see?