Buttery, salted macadamia nuts, are covered with honey sweetened dark chocolate, and sprinkled with unrefined sugar, coconut flakes or sea salt, creating a delicious treat. It’s a beautiful gift idea, or just a fun recipe for home.
(This is my recipe for the Nourishing Sweets and Treats Carnival).
This recipe was inspired by the childhood memory of my Grandparents always bringing home chocolate covered macadamia nuts from Hawaii and giving them as gifts at Christmas time. I remembered that these chocolate covered nuts were not only delicious but that they were doled out like the precious little morsels that they were from the adults. “These are expensive! Don’t eat too many. But here, you can have two. ” Those two chocolate covered nuts were always so delicious, but they always left you wanting more, because they were oh-so-good.
This year I decided to make my own as gifts for several family members (of course, including my Grandparents who inspired them). These are not only fun to make, but they make a delicious gift that is so decadent and special, but affordable as well. My sister told me that Trader Jo’s carried macadamia nuts from Australia, which were much cheaper (they also claimed they were better tasting, and they are definitely good). I also got my unsweetened chocolate there, which is a very nice tasting chocolate. I had the rest of the ingredients at home, so with the added cost of buying little candy paper cups, I was able to make over a hundred chocolate covered macadamia nuts for about ten dollars!
By the way, I definitely recommend packaging these morsels in the tiny candy/truffle paper cups if you are going to give them as a gift, because it really highlights the specialness of the gift. This is a great project to do with children who are old enough to help. Elena wasn’t quite there yet, but she stood on a stool and handed me nuts to cover with great interest.
Honey Sweetened, Dark Chocolate Macadamia Nuts
8 ounces of roasted and salted macadamia nuts
8 ounces of unsweetened chocolate
1/3 cup of honey, preferably raw
2 tablespoons butter or virgin coconut oil
Dash of sea salt
Toppings:
Sea Salt
Coconut Flakes
Rapadura or sucanat, maple sugar, or granulated palm sugar
1-First place your favorite Christmas CD in CD player. These are easy to make, but they do take a little patience, and nothing sets the mood better than Christmas music.
2-Chop your unsweetened chocolate very fine.
3-In a double boiler (you can make one by fitting a heat proof bowl snugly in a pot),
place several inches of water in the pot and bring to a low simmer. In the top part, or bowl, place your chopped chocolate, honey, and oil or butter and dash of salt. Place the bowl on top of your pot of simmering water, keeping the water very low (the water should never touch the bowl), and stir this mixture constantly until it combines and about three quarters of the contents are melted. Take the top part of your double boiler off of the stove, drying the bottom of the bowl, and place on the counter top. Stir until everything is melted.
4-You are now ready to dip! First have a cookie sheet covered with wax paper near by.
Then, there are two ways to do this. You can use a fork and a spoon for the first method. Place one nut on the fork, spooning the chocolate over the fork, turning the nut over, and spooning more over the fork, and letting the rest drain away through the tines of the fork, and gently shaking away the excess. Or simply drop the nut into the bowl, and fish it out with the fork, once again shaking off the excess chocolate. Place on the cookie sheet. If there are a lot of small pieces of nuts, you can also place three chocolate covered nuts together and as the chocolate hardens it will make a cluster. When the chocolate is the warmest, it will leave a thin coat of chocolate, so you may want to let it cool slightly. If it ever cools too much, simply place back on the double boiler, and reheat slightly.
5-Then, before it hardens, sprinkle your choice of topping on it. The sugar topping, when using unrefined golden colored sugar, almost looks like gold dust on the top. The coconut flakes add a nice contrasting texture and are very pretty as well, and the sea salt adds a nice dimension to the candy (just don’t do too much! A few grains of salt is sufficient).
6-Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you run out of chocolate or nuts (though the amounts should be just about right). Allow your candy to harden up at room temperature or in the refrigerator, then package as desired and enjoy!
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oh Kimi….Thank you….Thank you…Thank you…..for this recipe…I am so excited….my husbands family gives us the same one you had from Hawaii each year….we love them….but they are so unhealthy…we just got some and I ate a few…with out looking at the ingredients and well found out later they had milk in them…they upset my little baby’s tummy so much (he can’t have dairy and I am nursing)….and my own body was telling me after a few hours….my husband just loves them and eats way too many too so I will be very happy to make them for him with better ingredients….
We have always said that they would be really good with a bowl of ice cream….smiles..
Thank you so much…we are very excited to try your recipe…..
Blessings to you..
Jessica O.
Wow! Those are beautiful, I can almost taste the love from here,forget the store bought:) How can you go wrong with nuts and chocolate<3. Trader Joe's is so great, it's the best place for nuts and chocolate. So cheap and soo good how do they do it?. Macadamias are native to Austrailia I wonder if thats why they're cheaper? What a good money saving gift, I might have to follow your lead and make some for my family. Thanks for anoher great idea Kimi!
They look absolutely delicious!
I’m excited to see everyone’s recipes.
Stacy
These look gorgeous, and what a wonderful gift! I love the look of the unrefined sugar on top . . . but am sure that I’d love the sea salt ones! There is just something about salted nuts and dark chocolate that always does it for me!
Thank you for such a great recipe!
Best,
Sarah
Ooh- these look so good! Thanks, Kimi! 🙂
I just e-mailed you my recipe link.
Blessings,
Michele
Thanks for posting this recipe. They look AMAZING!!! Can’t wait to try them out.
Jennifer
http://glutenfreela.blogspot.com/
Yum, I’m a year late on this but glad to have found this recipe! I was scrolling through seeing if you had a pineapple upside down cake recipe . . . 🙂
I just tried this recipe TWICE tonight and the chocolate seized with the addition of the raw honey each time. Chocolate cannot handle any type of moisture and I am sure that this was the problem. I will not be trying to put raw honey in it again! If I try this recipe again it will definitely be with nothing anywhere close to having moisture and I will leave the chocolate unsweetened. I am disappointed and wondering how you got yours to work Kimi? Looks delicious, however, and is a great idea. I turned the seized chocolate into double layer pistachio bark, which looks interesting (chocolate is NOT smooth) but tastes fine. Thankfully I did not have to throw out the chocolate and waste it all!
How frustrating! You know, I’ve been able to make this recipe many times in the past without any problems, but the last time I made it, I had it seize up after I reheated it the second time. It is so frustrating when that happens. I hate it! I wonder if different honey has different moisture content or what?
Anyway, for future reference for all of us, another natural unrefined “dry” sweetener like rapadura, sucanat, maple sugar, or coconut sugar is probably much easier to work with.
Yeah! It really does make no sense. Why would raw honey be so different than adding something like heavy cream to the double boiler? Oh well, it did make some delicious dark chocolate pistachio bark!
I have a recipe for hot fudge sauce that calls for adding water to the chocolate in the double-boiler, and I was terrified, but it worked perfectly. Strange!
Yum!!! This looks so delicious! I will definitely try this out asap. I’ve been looking for some “healthier” snacks lately, and what better way than to make it yourself, right?
Thanks for the recipe 🙂
Victoria
Aloha! My family and I loved this recipe. We used fresh crushed hawaii macadamia nuts from a local farm out here, and the recipe turned out sooo good! mahalo for this blog:)