Dark Chocolate Almond Bites

These little clusters of almond, coconut and dark chocolate will satisfy your sweet tooth without wrecking your diet!

I’ve been trying to eat healthier this year, and so far I’m doing really well (even with a baking blog!). My friend Laura and I walk each day and when we do we talk a lot about things we crave that could be made healthier. She was telling me that she craves chocolate so much that she takes a few dark chocolate chips and adds some almonds for a snack each night. I was in the process of making some coconut cut-out cookies and I had extra toasted coconut. We started brainstorming ways to make a cookie with relatively low calories and carbs. This is the result 🙂 They are delicious (!!) and as far as I can tell, they are about 85 calories each and 6 carbs. Which is perfect. Just perfect.

They aren’t very pretty- but who needs pretty when you can have yummy and relatively healthy? 🙂

Here’s how we made them: (printable recipe here)

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 cup of toasted coconut (buy it toasted, or toast your own…)
• 1 cup of lightly salted, roasted almonds
• 2 plain rice cakes
• 1 cup of dark chocolate chips

DIRECTIONS:

• Place toasted coconut and almonds in a food chopper and chop to small pieces. Place in a mixing bowl.
• Crumble up the 2 rice cakes into very small pieces and add to bowl.
• Melt chocolate chips, and pour them over the top of mixture. 
• Stir until well-blended and then use a medium cookie scoop to spoon out evenly-sized cookies onto a parchment paper- covered cookie sheet. (My batch made 22, and calories and carbs were calculated accordingly.)
• Place cookie sheet in refrigerator until cookies harden up. Enjoy! 

My thoughts: These are really, really good. I bagged mine up in individual cello bags and tied them shut with a twist tie. That way, I wasn’t tempted to eat more than one at a time! These are a perfect “gotta have some chocolate” treat. Lots of protein from the nuts, healthy oils from the coconut, and a little bit of crunch from the rice cakes. Enjoy! ~r

Other yummy (slightly less healthy!) cookie recipes here at Easybaked (click on a photo to see the recipe):