3 Easy Date Ball Recipes | Healthy Snack & Dessert Ideas #healthysnacks #DessertIdeas

Hi everyone! Today I'm going to share with you how to make my most favorite dessert and snack, date balls. I have three different recipes to share with you today. Chocolate, banana coconut, and lemon cranberry. These are beyond easy to make. They only require a few simple ingredients. Plus there's no cooking involved and they're not only the tastiest little things, but they're wholesome and nutrient dense as well. They're perfect for the summer. They make a great treat to bring to gatherings and events with friends and family. So let's get started. These three date ball recipes all have a couple things in common and that is shredded coconut and medjool dates and a little bit of sea salt. You can use nuts, but I prefer shredded coconut. So the first recipe that we're making are chocolate date balls. Now you're going to want to soak your dates first, just for a couple of minutes. You can do this by peeling open your dates and removing the pit and then just plopping them into a bowl of warm water and just for a couple minutes, two to three minutes is totally fine. That way it just helps to soften them and moisten them up a little bit if they're a bit dry and then you can just strain them. For the full recipe for all of these date balls, you can find that on my blog. Next we're going to add our shredded coconut into our food processor and process it until the shredded coconut turns into kind of like a fine powder, not totally into a flour, but just a little bit more finely ground. Add a little bit of sea salt in there, which really helps to bring out the sweetness in these recipes and our cacao powder. You want to look for organic raw cacao powder. That is the purest form of chocolate that you can find and it's really rich in magnesium. So give it a little pulse and then we can add in our softened medjool dates. Pulse it again a few times until it turns into a bit of a dough. You don't want to over process it or else it'll become like a paste. You just want to make it so that it's nice and doughy. You only need to process it for just maybe 10 seconds or so. And then you have your dough and you can roll it into your balls. What I also like to do is I'll roll them in a little extra cacao powder. You don't want to use too much because cacao is very, very bitter, but this just helps to soak up any moisture so that they're not sticky on the fingers and it's totally optional. Next up we have banana coconut date balls. These are so, so good. It's like little banana bread bites. So we're going to follow the exact same method. Add your shredded coconut into your food processor, a little bit of sea salt, and if you'd like, you can add just a pinch of cinnamon. That's optional. And then process it again until it's a little bit more finely ground. We're going to add in just about a quarter of a banana. You don't want to add too much because you just want a subtle banana punch. That's the secret to this one. So throw that all in there with your dates and process again. Make sure you don't over process or else it'll become a paste. You just want to make it into a nice dough where you can form balls. Now if you find that this particular dough is a little bit more wet than the other ones, then you can just add a little extra shredded coconut to dry it out a bit. Sometimes the banana will do that. So roll it into your balls and then we can go ahead and roll them even further in some shredded coconut. And just because it looks lovely. And lastly, we have lemon cranberry date balls. If you guys are lemon dessert fans, you're going to totally love these. So add your shredded coconut into your food processor and a little bit of sea salt, of course. Again, that just helps to really bring out the sweetness and makes them even more flavorful. Going to add in just a little bit of dried cranberries. I like to find cranberries that are sweetened with apple juice concentrate instead of sugar and process them until your coconut is finely ground and you have little bits and pieces of cranberries. You're then going to take a lemon and a lemon zester and just grind some of the lemon rind. You don't need very much. Also going to use the juice of half a lemon. So add that into your food processor and squeeze in your lemon, making sure you don't have any of the lemon seeds in there. Add in your dates and process. Once that's all made into your dough, you can again, of course, just roll them into balls. These ones are so fresh and so summery and zesty and lemony. They're very, very delicious. And so there you have it. Three delicious, easy date ball recipes that take only a couple of minutes. Store these in the refrigerator so that they can firm up a little bit. They should last at least a week or two, even longer in the freezer. Be sure to visit my blog for the full recipe details for these date balls. I hope you enjoyed this video. Let me know if you give these a try and which flavor is your favorite and I will see you guys next time. Bye!