Never have I eaten a chocolate covered cashew. I didn’t realize this, it never even crossed my mind, until I saw that today is Chocolate Covered Cashew Day. By all the luck in the world, I picked up a small snack-size bag of cashews from my mom’s house yesterday. So today, I’m going to have my first ever chocolate covered cashew.
But first, let me share some info I learned about the cashew. The cashew is originally from Brazil. The cashew tree grows these crazy looking fruit, and cashew nuts grow from under the fruit. When nuts grow that way, they’re called accessory fruit. Cashews as we know them are also contained in a shell that can cause reactions similar to poison ivy. The fruit themselves are called cashew apples and have been described as being sweet, bitter, acidic and with a chewy texture. I want to try one!
On to making the chocolate covered cashews. I had a lot of chocolate to choose from. I grabbed two dark chocolate bars and two milk chocolate bars from our stash. There were only two squares left of the sparkling wine bar chocolate, which might be the best chocolate I’ve had in my life, by the way. I decided to only use two squares of each bar, so I don’t overestimate the amount of chocolate needed.
I start up a bain marie and drop in the last two delicious pieces of elderflower chocolate. It takes a while to warm up, but once it does it’s easy work. I use two spoons to gently coat each cashew individually in the chocolate soup.
It went pretty fast after that. I just coated as many cashews as I could, and then I wiped the rest of the chocolate off the bowl before moving on to the next chocolate bar. I set the coated cashews down onto a baking tray lined with parchment paper. When I got to the dark chipotle chocolate, the melting was interesting. It looked like it had some milk chocolate inside between the truffle part and dark chocolate bottom. It looked cool so here’s a picture.
When all was done, I had five elderflower cashews, eight mint cashews, three gin & tonic and nine chipotle.
I popped the tray into the freezer and came back twenty minutes later with some tasty chocolate covered cashews! The chocolate wasn’t the hardest, but these are going immediately into our stomachs anyways.
My boyfriend and I tried each flavour one at a time. The elderflower was incredibly delicious. It was flowery, and complemented the buttery cashew very well. The gin & tonic flavour did not go well with the cashew at all. I love the bitterness of the chocolate on its own, but it clashed with the nut. The mint flavour was my boyfriend’s favourite. Mint chocolate is amazing to begin with, and the cashew just made it better. The chipotle was mediocre, a lot of the spicy bite that made the chocolate great was lost in the combo somehow.
So here’s my verdict: Elderflower was the best, followed by mint, chipotle, then gin & tonic. It was interesting how the cashew changed the flavours. Normally dark chocolate is my go-to. Cashews will always be one of my favourite nuts.
Happy Chocolate Covered Cashews Day!