Date Candy Tastes Like Snickers And Only Requires 3 Ingredients

We've all tried to stave off our craving for a candy bar by eating a piece of fruit. While fruit is a healthy choice, it's far from the decadent satisfaction you get from biting into a chewy, creamy, sweet chocolate bar. Enter date candy, which offers a delicious middle ground, using nutritious, all-natural ingredients. This three-ingredient recipe consists of dates, almond butter, and melted dark chocolate to create "party-sized" candies that taste like Snickers. Dates are the ultra-sweet, chewy vessel to stuff with a heaping spoonful of almond butter, coat with melted chocolate, and freeze until the chocolate hardens. 

To execute the recipe, you'll start by pitting the dates, splitting them open by applying pressure with your thumbs in an outward motion, and removing the long, thin seed. This also creates the perfect opening for you to place a dollop of almond butter. Then, squeeze the opening back together and insert a toothpick horizontally through the middle of the date. The toothpick will serve as a handle for mess-free dipping into melted chocolate (you can also use a spoon to help cover every surface in a uniform coating of chocolate). Once you've submerged and coated the dates with chocolate, place them on a parchment paper-lined baking sheet and into the freezer. They'll firm up in a few hours and last for months. The combination of nutty almond butter, bittersweet dark chocolate, and rich dates is as delicious and texturally decadent as a candy bar.

Date candy is a well-balanced, all-natural bite-sized dessert where each ingredient perfectly complements the next layer. Nutty, almost savory almond butter gets an ultra-sweet pairing with the date and is finished with a bittersweet addition of dark chocolate. Plus, the crunch of the frozen chocolate, the chewiness of the date, and the creamy nut-butter filling are the height of textural contrasts.

Despite how perfect this three-ingredient dessert tastes as is, you can enhance its flavor and texture with other ingredients. Coarse sea salt is a sophisticated topping for chocolate bars, brownie brittle, cookies, and more. So naturally, adding some fleur de sal or coarse sea salt will add a pop of crunch while also balancing the sweetness of the other ingredients, so you can really taste their underlying chocolatey, nutty, and fruity flavors. A drizzle of honey, caramel sauce, or white chocolate on top of each date candy will deepen its sweetness while imparting their own flavors.

If you really want to approximate a Snickers bar, swap the dark chocolate for milk chocolate and almond butter for crunchy peanut butter, drizzling the chocolate-coated date with thick caramel sauce. You can keep the original ingredients and add a final coating of shredded coconut for a date candy twist on Almond Joy. Based on the wealth of tahini and chocolate ice cream and chocolate chip cookie recipes, you could swap almond butter for tahini and top the frozen chocolate coating with honey and crushed banana chips.