Dark Chocolate Fruit and Nut Tiffin

This is a quick and easy treat for rainy afternoons, and luckily – as far as this recipe is concerned – we have a few of those in the Welsh Borders.  This is the kind of treat that is pretty low effort but still something that you can really sink your teeth into.  

Tiffin is a kind of chewy and crunchy biscuit cake, and one of those indulgences where you can adjust the recipe with whatever you have to hand. If you add some plant-based marshmallows, it will take you down the path to ‘Rocky Road’.

This is where scraping the bottom of the barrel is acceptable. The biscuit barrel, quite literally. You don’t have to be too choosy here - whatever biscuits you have laying around will be fine. If your biscuits happen to be soft, you can refresh them in the oven. Bake them for 10 minutes at 180C and then leave them to cool so they crisp up a bit before adding them to the tiffin.

You can make this completely raw by using raw chocolate and replacing the biscuits for more nuts for crunch.

What could be a better way to spend a rainy afternoon, than curling up with a warm drink and piece of chewy and crunchy tiffin?

DARK CHOCOLATE FRUIT AND NUT TIFFIN 

INGREDIENTS

400g dark chocolate callets or quick raw chocolate
1 heaped tablespoon almond butter, peanut butter or coconut butter
2 tablespoons agave syrup or coconut blossom nectar
¼ cup/ 40g roughly chopped nuts (eg almonds/Brazil nuts/pistachios)
¼ cup/ 40g shelled hemp seeds
¼ cup/40g sunflower seeds or pumpkin seeds
¼ cup/40g chopped dried apricots or prunes
¼ cup/40g raisins, cranberries or sour cherries
6 – 8 biscuits, broken (such as ginger nuts, hob nobs or gluten-free digestives) or you could use extra nuts
Pinch fine sea salt

METHOD

Line an 8-inch square brownie pan with non-stick baking parchment.

Roughly chop the chocolate into small pieces and melt it in a bain marie (a heatproof bowl over barely simmering water). Or you could melt the chocolate pieces in a bowl in the dehydrator.

In a separate bowl, combine the nuts, seeds and dried fruit with the broken biscuits. Add the almond/peanut butter and sweetener to the bowl with a pinch of salt and combine well. Add in the melted chocolate and mix so all the fruit and nuts are well coated.  

Put the mixture in the lined pan and chill for a couple of hours in the refrigerator until firm.

When firm, break into pieces and store in a sealed container in the refrigerator.

It will keep for up to two weeks.