Healthy Brownie Balls

But what’s a girl (or guy) to do when those resilient chocolate cravings set in? You know, the ones that start as an innocent whisper to just have two squares of that dark chocolate bar (because dark chocolate is healthy, after all) and quickly escalates to devouring entire sleeves of Oreos, leaving you in chocolate wonderment of how it all happened so quickly.

Benefits of dates

Enter Healthy Brownie Balls to the rescue! The Brownie Balls are naturally sweet, with dates as their base. While dates are not low in calories or sugar, they boast a variety of incredible health benefits, such as promoting digestive, brain, and heart health, reducing blood pressure and the risk of strokes, and helping with a healthy pregnancy and delivery. Dates can help with weight loss, prevent colon cancer, and naturally help treat iron-deficient anemia.

These healthy yet sinful Brownie Balls will satisfy even your strongest chocolate craving and can be customized with a variety of tastes and textures depending on your mood. They are so fudgy and moist, you’ll feel guilty eating them, yet when you see the five simple ingredients- dates, cocoa powder, coconut oil, vanilla, salt- you’ll feel much better.

1 dough, 4 ways

For this post, I customized the base dough in four ways, though the dough is perfect on its own or rolled in cocoa. These modifications included banana/peanut butter, coconut, toasted pecans/cinnamon, and cayenne/sea salt. Truly, the possibilities are endless. You might want to try:

• Adding a teaspoon of alcohol for a “boozy truffle” taste
• Rolling in pistachios, pumpkin, or sunflower seeds, topping with a candied walnut, adding chopped peanuts or peanut butter to the mix
• Adding a ¼ teaspoon of different flavors of pure extracts

Directions:

It feels strange writing directions because this is barely even a recipe- it’s so simple and takes only 5 minutes. You may want to double (or triple) the recipe- you can refrigerate and freeze the dough for later cravings.

1. Use 14 fresh dates or soak dates in warm water for 10 minutes. Put dates in food processor.
2. Put 1 tsp of vanilla, 2 tbsp of unsweetened cocoa powder, 2 tbsp nut butter (optional), and a dash of salt in the food processor.
3. Blend until a smooth paste is formed. Add water, a tsp at a time, if needed for a dough-like consistency. You should be able to pinch the dough between your fingers and have it stick.
4. Roll dough into golf ball sized balls. If you can wait to devour them, they’re good cold. Store in an air-tight container in the fridge.
5. Optional- dust with cocoa powder or divide dough to add customizations.

Let me know what you think- how did you make these Brownie Balls your own?