This recipe is the fault of my friend Scott, which seems a little unfair, since it actually isn’t the recipe he asked for, and in fact probably isn’t going to do him much good at all! Sorry, Scott – the quinoa one will happen later in the week. He requested a recipe for a high-protein snack that used cooked quinoa and Nutella and was sweetened with agave nectar.
I had every intention of doing this, but currently my oven is full of a cake that will take 4 hours to cook, and my ideas involving cooked quinoa all necessitate baking, so that the snack ends up crispy rather than soggy. And I wanted to try something *now*. Also, I had this popped amaranth sitting around, waiting to be used. And then there was the fact that I don’t actually like Nutella, and that if one is wanting a snack sweetened with agave nectar, it’s a bit silly to include Nutella, which is full of sugar…
And it all went downhill from there, really. But in a good way, because these little snacks taste gorgeous, and look incredibly cute, all black-brown with little white dots of amaranth through them. Try them and see…
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120 g hazelnuts 30 ml cocoa 30 ml agave nectar 30 ml almond butter (can you tell I had this 30 ml measure just sitting there, looking convenient? So many recipes develop proportions based on what’s clean and nearby at the time…) 3 dates 1 cup popped amaranth
I have to admit, given that March has been something of a hell-month for me, I’d rather decided that I would let the March Vegetarian Challenge slide quietly into oblivion. But then the fabulous Johanna of Gourmet Green Giraffe made the most stunning Easter Egg pizza (really, you have to go and look at it, because it’s quite something), and before I knew it, three more people had joined the Easter Egg bandwagon, and here I was, the hostess with absolutely nothing to show for the month.
