Sweetly Raw and Turtle Cookies

I'm kinda excited at the moment. I discovered a book called Sweetly Raw by Heather Pace. Like many other raw cookbooks, this one uses uses nuts... and lots of it. This book takes a lot of traditional favorites to make in the raw. I found a recipe for chocolate turtles that I just happen to have all the ingredients for... so unbaking time!

The recipe is in three parts; a cookie, a caramel style spread and a chocolate dip garnished with pecans. At the moment, my food processor needs a new life so I used my vitamix for making the cookie dough which required the use of a tamper. I might have over processed it a smidge... a little bit... okay a fair bit but not enough to render unusable or tasteless... just a bit oily. I rolled the dough and used a small round cookie cutter to make the base. I weighed my ingredients and used a slightly smaller cookie cutter which made 25 cookie bases. After the initial hour dehydrating and a higher temperature (to raise the core temp of the food)... it needs to dehydrate for 30 hours! Oh my...

That was yesterday. Fast forward to today. The next part I plan to blend the spread this afternoon. Sitting in the fridge thickens it making it mound worthy. Then all that's left is making the chocolate to dip in. I will post pictures of the cookies completed when I'm done (Monday morning possibly).

Here are a few highlights of the recipes I'm most interested in trying (although many others look really good as well):

Nanimo Bars
Peppermint Swirl Cheesecake
Keylime Pie Bars
Peanut Butter and Jelly Bars
Pecan Preline Ice Cream
Mint Chip Ice Cream
Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream Cake
Chocolate-Covered Chewy Toffee
Tiramisu Parfait

You can get remarkable results with the right ingredients. Unfortunately, the ingredients in this book require an investment; luckily, for several of them a little goes a long way. I loved how this book had tons of photos and great visual instructions for certain tasks. Most recipes have an accompanying mouth watering photo.