The charm of coffee beans enveloped in chocolate creates an enduring sugary delight, and the best part is, you can effortlessly create them in your home kitchen. By concocting your personal recipe, the entire spectrum of taste compositions essentially lies in your innovative grasp.
You can choose from dark, milk, or white chocolate for your coating and you can always add in extra ingredients, for example, chili or perhaps for a sweeter tooth, strawberry, to enhance the taste and make them your own.
There are also many different types of coffee beans to choose from so it’s up to you what kind of taste you want to end up with. For the perfect chocolate-covered coffee bean, we’d recommend going for a medium roast bean.
Lighter roasts can give a rather unpleasant acidic note when combined with chocolate, whereas dark roasts will give a bitter taste, neither of which is what you are aiming for here. So go for the middle of the road when it comes to roast level. These would be beans on a scale of two up to five mainly.
As well as the roast level, you can choose from a wide variety of coffee bean flavors and sizes for your sweet treat too but here are some of the beans that we think work particularly well for this recipe:
Arabica coffee beans – from Ethiopia, they are small but have a distinctive aromatic flavor to them and work very well as sweets.
Liberica coffee beans – from Liberia are nice big beans that work well if you want your sweet treats on the larger side.
Excelsa coffee beans – from North Africa are again very aromatic and make the perfect bean for a sweet treat as they are medium-sized.
A quick tip – avoid using Robusta coffee beans because they are very strong in caffeine and have a bitter taste so are definitely not a good choice for this, although they make lovely coffee to drink.
So now you have chosen the roast and the bean, you need to think about what kind of cover you want to use to create your dinner guest treats. You can go for one kind of chocolate and which one will depend on the flavor you prefer.
Very dark plain chocolate will create a much more bitter-tasting treat when combined with the coffee bean, which some people will love and find very refreshing after a meal, for example. However, for those with a sweet tooth, milk chocolate or even white chocolate will go down well.
You can also add in extra flavors so dark chocolate with orange or chili powder and maybe white chocolate with some coconut. The choices really are endless according to the type of combination you want to create.
So here is a quick recipe you can use for whichever flavor you go for:
Prep time: half an hour
Cooking time: four hours
Leave overnight in the fridge before eating them, after cooking has completed
Ingredients:
- 330 grams/12 ounces of chocolate of your choice
- 85 grams or 3.5 ounces of coffee beans
- 15 grams of grated coconut (if required)
- 1 teaspoon of chili powder (if required)
Instructions
- Set up a bain-marie, so a small saucepan or heat-proof bowl which sits above another saucepan of boiling water.
- Once the water is boiling, break the chocolate into pieces and place them in the small saucepan or heatproof bowl to melt the chocolate. Stir it occasionally until all melted.
- If you are adding chili powder, coconut, or anything else, add it into the melted chocolate at this stage and stir thoroughly.
- Layout a baking tray with greaseproof paper ready to receive your chocolate-coated coffee beans.
- Take a small batch of the beans and immerse them into the melted chocolate, then remove them and place them on the tray to cool. Do this until you have coated all of your beans.
- Put the tray of coated beans in the fridge for around half an hour, to allow the first coat of chocolate to cool.
- Repeat the entire procedure three times in total.
Once completed, leave all the chocolate-covered beans in the fridge overnight, before eating them, to make sure all of the chocolate coatings are hardened and won’t fall off when you go to serve them to your guests.
All that remains is to enjoy your homemade chocolate-covered coffee beans and to use them to impress your family and friends. While it might be a little time-consuming to prepare them, it is a very simple process and you can experiment with different chocolates and different flavors to see which ones you like the best. A timeless favorite, the only limit will be your imagination and the ingredients you have in your cupboard.
