DURHAM -- If you want to avoid sugar-high induced screaming without denying your kids their annual Christmas chocolate indulgence, try an all-natural homemade option. Miranda Gibson, a culinary nutritionist and Your Life expert, recommends crafting your own chocolate using cacao powder, cacao butter and natural sweeteners such as honey, maple syrup or coconut sugar.
"Kids always want chocolate, but unfortunately when you buy it from the grocery store it's loaded with sugar and other filler," Ms. Gibson said, explaining that ingredients are often added to enhance the flavour and help the chocolate stay in solid form. "That all adds to blood sugar levels, creating irritable, cranky kids. With natural sweeteners you get a slower release of sugar into the bloodstream, which prevents it from spiking and then crashing."
The purity of homemade chocolate has other health benefits as well. "When you have chocolate in cacao form that's the highest concentration of antioxidants, which help rid the body of free radicals," Ms. Gibson explained. "It also has high amounts of magnesium, which helps to relax muscles."
Making your own chocolate at home can be a fun activity for the kids, who can help pour the chocolate into ice cube trays to cool. You can also make things more interesting by buying ice cube trays in fun shapes like stars. Ms. Gibson recommends silicone ice cube trays, because the flexibility allows the cooled chocolates to be popped out easier.
Although natural chocolate can be more bitter-tasting than store-bought chocolates, natural sweeteners can help to make it more palatable for kids craving a sweet treat. "The more honey or maple syrup you add the more mainstream type of flavour you get," Ms. Gibson explained.
"During the transition it's definitely easier to add more sweetener so kids won't notice the difference between homemade and store-bought chocolate. Then you can gradually reduce the amount, that way you're reprogramming their taste buds."