When I first moved to London one my first food love was definitely digestive biscuits. When then they brought out the chocolate and caramel flavour I knew my life was complete! Jokes apart caramel and chocolate digestive biscuits used to be by far my favourite biscuits. They just dunk so well in your tea and then the chocolate goes a bit soft and squishy, YUM! I would easily go through a whole pack by myself.

When I changed my diet 3 years ago sweet and desserts were definitely the hardest thing to replace, especially back then when even in the health food stores they weren’t that many healthy and plantbased options. That’s why I started baking and making my own sweet treats.

 In case you haven’t noticed I have got a massive sweet tooth and I tried to fight it for so many years, thinking that maybe I wasn’t eating enough carbohydrates, trying every trick on hearth to stop me from craving sweet things, until it got to the point where I was just so fed up of restricting myself. Now I just happily embrace it but I always make sure that my treats are still full of plant goodness and free of refined sugar.

Saying that if you have skin issues, especially hormonal acne, sugar (even natural sweetener like maples syrup, honey, dates etc..) is definitely something which you want to be cautious with. From my personal experience fresh fruit does not affect me but when it comes to dried fruit like dates, figs or cakes, biscuits I need to sensible and don’t eat 10 in one go, which sometimes can be definitely proven to be a challenge!:)

Now whenever I crave something sweet I always try to make it myself and if I make a big batch I ll save few for me and I ll take the rest into the office for my colleagues to share. In this I can enjoy baking without having the temptations of eating the whole lot.

These healthy digestive have all the richness of the traditional biscuits but they are full of goodness and they actually have digestive properties thanks to fibres in the oats and dates. I love coating mine with very dark raw chocolate to still have some antioxidants from the cacao. The contrast between the sweetness of the almond butter and date caramel with the bitterness of the chocolate is literally to die for! Thank goodness I brought most them into the office otherwise I would have easily scoffed the whole batch by myself!:)

Ingredients:

For the biscuit layer:

1 cup of oats

1 cup of coconut flour

3/4 cup of brown rice flour

1/2 teaspoon of baking powder

2 tablespoon of melted coconut oil

2 tablespoon of almond butter

2 tablespoon of almond milk

4 tablespoon of coconut syrup

2 tablespoo of flaxseeds + 6 tablespoon of water

For the caramel layer:

10 medjool dates

2 heaped tablespoon of almond butter

a splash of water

1 teaspoon of vanilla powder or essence

For the chocolate layer:

100 gr of good quality dark chocolate – I have use Ombar raw chocolate 72% cacao

Method:

Start by preheating the oven at 180 degrees.

To make the “flax egg”in a bowl simply mix the milled flaxseeds with the water and leave it on one side until it assumes a gloopy consistency.

Place the oats into a blender and blitz until a flour starts to form. Transfer the flour to a bowl and add the coconut flour, brown rice flour and the baking powder.

In a separate bowl mix the coconut syrup, almond butter, coconut oil and add the “flax egg”.Whisk everything together. Add this wet mixture to the bowl with the flours. Combine everything well , first with a spoon and then with your hands. You should have a sticky quite hard dough.

Dust your working surface with a bit of flour and with a rolling pin roll the dough. It can be quite crumbly so you want to be gentle with it. With a cookie cutter or a glass cut out your cookies and place in a baking tray layered with parchment paper. Bake the biscuits in the oven for 20 minutes or until the edges start to be golden brown.

 While the biscuits bake make the caramel middle layer. Simply place all the ingredients into a food processor and blitz until you have a thick and creamy spread (which by the way is sooo delicious by itself!). My food processor is not the strongest one so I had to let it run for a good 4-5 minutes scraping the mixture from  the edges every now and then.

Once the biscuits are baked let them cooled down for 10-15 minutes. With a knife spread the caramel on top of them and put them in the fridge to set for half an hour. For the chocolate layer simply melt the dark chocolate in a bowl on top of a pan of boiling water.

Pour the melted chocolate on top of the biscuits and gently spread it with the back of a spoon.

Store them in an air tight container for up to a week.