I posted about making homemade chocolate chips a long time ago. Since that time, I’ve received several emails asking for more help and detail about how this works. It seems that many of you who tried the recipe are having trouble getting everything to melt and dissolve and mix like it should.

In light of your chocolate chip frustration…I decided to do a more thorough tutorial about how I make chocolate chips. The words Chocolate and frustration should never be in the same sentence together. Ever.

You can use coconut oil or butter to make your chips. I used butter this time because I’m almost out of coconut oil. Butter doesn’t quite work as well as coconut oil. They tend to be softer with butter…but still oh so good. Especially when you put them in these Chocolate Chip Brownies.

Here again is the recipe:

Homemade Chocolate ChipsYum

1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup rapadura or sucanat (you can use white sugar if you want)
1 cup coconut oil or butter
1 teaspoon vanilla extract  (homemade vanilla extract if you have it!)

Begin by placing the cocoa, sucanat and butter (or coconut oil) into a quart sized jar. 

Fill a small saucepan with two or three inches of water. Place the jar into the saucepan/water. Turn the heat on medium/high to begin melting the butter.

Stir often. After five minutes, my mixture looked like this:

After ten minutes, my mixture looked like this:

It took a total of thirteen minutes for the butter to completely melt. I then pulled it out of the water, added the vanilla and stirred well.

The mixture in my jar looked and smelled SO GOOD that I wanted to drink it. But I didn’t.  That would have made quite a mustache. 

Pour the mixture into a 9×13 inch pan covered with parchment paper. Spread it as evenly as you can. 

As you can hopefully tell from the following picture, I still have a little sucanat that refused to completely dissove. Can you see the bits of chunkyness? That’s been one of the questions I’ve received from several of you. But…the little bits of chunkyness don’t hurt anything. My chocolate chips tasted just fine!

You like how the ceiling fan is reflecting in the chocolate? 
I’m just trying to show off my terrible photography skills.

Place your pan into the refrigerator for 1-2 hours so that the chocolate can harden. Remove it from the parchment paper and break it into chunks. Store in refrigerator in an airtight container (unless you and your family eat them all first).

Just a note:  These chocolate chips taste wonderful in Homemade Chocolate Chip Cookies, but keep in mind that they are very pure and therefore tend to melt and get runny while baking. Chocolate Chip Cookies with homemade chocolate chips taste wonderful, but might look a little bit funny. No matter, ugly cookies taste good too. :)  I recommend eating these chocolate chips plain, mixed with peanuts or in trail mix, in Chocolate Chip Brownies or in Chocolate Chocolate Chip Muffins.

And now, I do believe I need to use my freshly made chocolate chips to bake brownies. After I eat some green beans and broccoli of course…