A watercolour of rough dark cocoa and date balls studded with chopped nuts
Generated with OpenAI gpt-image-1
Adapted from Energy balls

Cocoa, date and nut bites

An established dish converted to shelf-stable ingredients. Every substitution is documented below.

How long it keeps

About 6 months, set by Dates (dried, pitted).

Indicative, for planning a build before you buy. The answer for a pack you already own is the best before date printed on it, and that only holds if it has been stored as the label says.

Serves
4
Burners
0
Pans
0
Water
0.05 L
Active
12 min
Total
12 min

Ingredients

No heat, no fridge, and they keep for days in a tin, which makes them the closest thing in this cupboard to a genuinely useful pocket food.

The work is all in the chopping, and it is real work. Dates are sticky and resist a knife; keep wetting the blade.

  1. Chop the dates as finely as you can manage, then keep going. You want a coarse paste, not pieces.
  2. Chop the nuts roughly, some dust, some proper chunks.
  3. Work everything together in a bowl with the back of a spoon: dates, nuts, cocoa, oats and the salt. It will look hopeless for a minute and then come together.
  4. Squeeze into walnut-sized balls, pressing hard. If it will not hold, add a teaspoon of water; if it is too wet, more oats.

The salt is not optional. A pinch against that much date and cocoa is what keeps it from being flat, and it is the difference between these and the shop-bought version.

Makes about 12, which is four servings. They firm up over a few hours and are better the next day.

What this was adapted from

Energy balls: the dried-fruit-and-nut confection, in the form that needs no machine

  • a food processor → chopping by hand and working the paste with a spoon

    These are normally blitzed. By hand the texture is coarser and it takes ten minutes of real effort rather than one -- but it needs no power, and the rougher texture is arguably nicer than the uniform paste a machine makes.