I made these cups based on Minimalist Baker’s Caramel Almond Butter Cups.

The hardest part of trying to be vegan for me hasn’t been cheese. It has been caramel. I love chocolate and caramel together. This vegan caramel sauce is amazing.  It is easier to make than date based caramel since I don’t have a super duper blender to make that smooth and it is less expensive.  Dates cost a lot.  The original recipe she posts for the caramel sauce isn’t vegan.  It used heavy cream.  The notes on the almond butter cups though explain making it with the thick part of coconut milk.  Do that.  It is incredible.

The caramel recipe makes a lot so you can find good uses for it.  So far I’ve used it as glue to attach chocolate chips to popcorn!

The cups are fussy to make but not as hard as I thought.  Just use a spoon to put a little melted chocolate in a mini cupcake liner and then spread some on the sides of the liner with the back of the spoon.  I used melted dark chocolate chips.  Then put in a small amount of a nut butter – powdered sugar mixture and pour some caramel sauce over it.  Top with more chocolate to seal it all and freeze.

Amazing!

Clean up ended up being tasty too. I had an improvised double broiler with chocolate all over the sides and some left over filling. I poured the filling in the double broiler and stirred. The filling scooped the chocolate off the sides. I rolled it in balls, refrigerated it to set, and called it truffles.

Not pretty but yummy.

I doubled the amounts used in the original recipe. I think I was a little heavy handed on the chocolate because it didn’t make double the expected amount of cups for me.