Gooooood day!
All and all, hope everyone is having a great 2017 already. The husband and I already launched our fitness plan for the first quarter of the year, how about you? Tell me everything about it!
Today I wanted to share another version of an “Energy Ball” (Click here to find my other recipe), one you can easily take with you and eat it while you’re driving or walking to the gym/yoga/park/trail, while going on a hike over the weekend or even use it as a dessert any given day.
Ingredients (15 balls)
½ cup almonds
½ cup dried cranberries
1/8 cup cashews
2 scoops of protein powder (I’m using my favorite: VEGA Sport protein).
2 tsp hemp seed
2 tsp chia
1 banana
2 tbs almond butter
4 tbs maple syrup
2 tbs water
Ghirardelli premium baking chips I bag of (Bittersweet chocolate 60% cacao). You can use any other chocolate chips you like, just remember to keep a high level of cocoa.
Preparation (25 minutes)
Put the following ingredients into the food processor or blender and pulse until you get all the ingredients finely crushed: almonds, cranberries, cashews hemp and chia.
Now, add the protein powder, banana, almond butter, maple syrup and water and keep pulsing until you get a well-combined mixture. Don’t worry if you get a crumbly mixture, that is actually what you want, the oil in the nuts will keep the balls together.
Now, time for a good arm workout! Take a spoonful of mixture and press it together to form a ball, it has to be firm but not too firm as a rock! Repeat this step with the rest of the mixture and reserve.
Now make a water bath and melt the chocolate in a large bowl. Once the chocolate is melted, turn off the heat and proceed to coat all your balls with the chocolate using a fork. I placed all the coated balls on a cutting board wrapped with aluminum foil.
Once you’re done coating, you can garnish with hemp seed and crushed almonds.
Finally, just place the tray with all the balls in the freezer for a couple of minutes just so that the chocolate sits.
You can have one or two of these balls with a glass of champagne this upcoming Sunday at brunch. OR you can go the healthy way (which I know you will) and have one 30 minutes before your daily-high-intensity workout.
Happy weekend!
UPDATE!:
We spent our weekend in Sedona, Arizona and of course I took some of these energy balls for the road and some more just have some healthy snack on hand. Here some picture of the beautiful town, if you ever have a chance to visit this place, I'm sure you will love it.
