You really, really need to try the recipe for these Chocolate & Almond Protein Bars!

They’re vegan and sweetener-free but you can play around with your powders and sweeteners if you don’t want yours plant-based or if you want to make your bars lower in carbs. Just make sure you make them and see for yourself how easy and delicious homemade protein bars really are. They’re honestly delicious!

Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

1/4 cup ground almonds
1 tbsp cocoa powder
1/4 cup pea protein powder (See Note 1 for subs)
1/4 cup almond milk
1 tbsp coconut flour
2 tbsp of honey or agave (See Note 3 for some ideas if you want to have your bars be lower in carbs)
3 squares (30 grams) of 85% dark chocolate
1/2 square (5 grams) of white chocolate (this is optional; it’s just for the decoration)

Directions

1. First, mix all the bar ingredients in a bowl using a spoon or spatula, until you get a dough you can mould with your hands.

2. Divide this dough into four balls and then shape them into rectangles (use a hard surface to create angles by just pressing the bars against the flat surface on every side).

2. Once your dough had been shaped into four bars, melt your dark chocolate in a bain marie (a bowl on top of a pot of boiling water).

3. Dunk the bars in the chocolate or, if your bars are too soft and you fear they’ll fall apart, use the Bed Method (it entails you basically laying out a ‘bed’ of dark chocolate, placing the bar on top, and pouring melted chocolate on top and on the sides of the bar until you cover the whole thing).

4. If you want to then decorate the bars, melt your white chocolate and add some lines on top of each bar by sticking the white chocolate in a plastic bag, cutting the end of, and ‘piping’ the white chocolate onto the dark chocolate like a chocolatier of wizardry proportions.

5. Transfer the bars to the fridge for an hour or two or until the chocolate has set.

Macros per bar (out of four): 165kcals, 10g protein, 11g carbs (out of which 3g is fibre so net carbs: 8g) and 9g fat (mostly from the almonds).

Note 1: If you want to sub the pea protein powder, you can use casein (vanilla or chocolate flavoured). Your bars will no longer be vegan if you do but they’ll be just as tasty.

Note 2: If you want to lower your bars’ carb content, consider subbing the agave for nut butter and sweetening your bars with a bit of granulated stevia. You’ll need to ‘play it by eye’ a bit and tweak your mixture until it gets to the right consistency (i.e. playdough-ish enough that it allows you to mould it into bars) but it’s totally doable and should yield a beautiful ‘set’ of homemade protein bars.