Chapter Thirty-Three

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Healthier Puppy Chow

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This might be one of the best puppy chow I have ever had. It’s crunchy, sweet, coated in a lovely almond maple and chocolate glaze with bites of chocolate and peanut butter. It’s straight up heavenly. It’s kind of amazing that it’s lower in sugar, with more wholesome ingredients, no one would know the difference. I promise.

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The swaps in this recipe are very intentional. I try to reduce the refined sugar where I can, and the rest are just more wholesome swaps. The whole wheat cereal squares here don’t have any sugar at all! Feel free to use any chocolates/ingredients that you prefer! That’s the best part of recipes like this, they’re very customizable!

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The chocolate coating for this puppy chow is a mixture of refined sugar and dairy free dark chocolate that is melted with coconut oil, and almond butter that has been sweetened with maple sugar. I get mine from a company called Justin’s that you can find at mostly any grocery store! You just want to combine these ingredients in a bowl and melt in a microwave in 30 second bursts. Mix between each burst. Once you have a smooth mixture, it’s ready to be poured over your whole wheat cereal.

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Once you’ve mixed that properly and each wheat is coated, you want to pour on your monkfruit. Monkfruit is a great replacement here for powdered sugar, it gives that lovely white coat and thin granule without having any strange aftertaste or general strong flavor like maple or coconut sugar. Honestly if you don’t have any idea it’s not powdered sugar you wouldn't be able to taste the difference at all.  Only thing you want to be careful with is that monkfruit is much more absorbent than powdered sugar is and so you want to make sure your wheat is mixed properly and that you may not get the same bright white that a powdered sugar leaves. But add as much until you like the taste and look of your puppy chow!

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This part of the recipe is completely customizable based on what you like or have on hand. Since this recipe is already dairy free you can use ingredients to make this dairy free or even vegan friendly. For my mix-ins I used Unreal milk chocolate and Secretly Sweet’s peanut butter pieces with dark chocolate covered pretzels.

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