I don’t eat sugar — my healthy chocolate peanut butter bars taste better than Snickers

For anyone who is trying to eat less sugar, having to do without delicious sweet foods like cookies and, especially, chocolate is definitely the hardest part.

I and haven’t consciously eaten any UPF more than a handful of times since. In reality, this also meant cutting out most foods with added sugar as they were often UPF too because, sadly, the vast majority of cookies, cakes, biscuits and chocolate bars available to us in shops and supermarkets are UPF.

So I resigned myself to almost never eating chocolate again. But the more I learned about eating healthily without UPF the more I realised that it was possible to still enjoy sweet treats, including chocolate.

And this is one of my best recipes. The combination of chocolate and peanut butter is divine, as anyone who has eaten a Snickers, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups or a peanut butter Kitkat Chunky knows only too well.

Don’t get me wrong: I have made some spectacularly bad tasting “healthy desserts” while experimenting with new foods. But this one is a winner. I would go so far as to say it tastes better than those mass-produced bars named above. And you don’t need to put it in an oven. You just need to mix the ingredients together in a bowl.

Even better, you don’t even need to be precise with these measurements. Just taste the mix as you go along and change as you need to.

Ingredients

• 100g dark chocolate (minimum 70% cocoa)
• 1 large handful of dates
• 2 tablespoons peanut butter
• 1 tablespoon honey
• 100g oats
• 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil (if needed)

Method

1. Put the dates in a blender and blitz until in small pieces

2. Add the peanut butter, oats and honey and blitz again (add some olive oil if you need to loosen the mixture – you can also use melted butter)

3. Press the mixture down into something like a small tupperware container (it can be anywhere from 1cm to 1inch deep — just pack it tight!

4. Melt the chocolate in a bowl above a pan of boiling water. When completely melted, pour over the peanut butter mixture

5. Place in the fridge for the chocolate to set and the rest of the mixture to go firm then cut into whatever bitesize or bar-size pieces you like!

Tip: dark chocolate can be bitter, so you can add some maple syrup to sweeten it if you like. Just make sure it’s not too hot and stir well so it doesn’t split and turn the chocolate oily.