Delicious, whole ingredient chocolate chia seed smoothie recipe

Delicious, whole ingredient chocolate chia seed smoothie recipe

• 6.17.2014

I am so excited about this recipe!

I love chia seed pudding (I've mentioned this recipe and this recipe before), and have discovered chia seeds only this year so love playing around with them. But, chia seed pudding takes several hours to sit after you make it, so I love this idea for a much faster whole food dessert-ey solution!

Also inspired by our new, smaller blender top. We recently bought a smaller container for our VitaMix blender we've had for years, and have been totally enjoying the easier clean-up and small size for everything from our morning blended coffee to blending up ice cream ingredients or blended soups to the occasional intense veggie smoothie.

So when I found The Spunky Coconut's 60-second chia shake recipe, I was totally excited to try my own version with our new blender and my new exciting ingredient, chia seeds (I buy them in the bulk foods section at Winco, a local grocery chain, but you can also buy them here). I wanted more of a filling, post-workout smoothie than a super sweet shake, so I tried my own variations with frozen banana as the sweetener and with other modifications.

I've seriously made about 7 or 8 of these in the past couple of weeks. Seriously. I think I've got my favorite recipe down and ready to share with you!

Ingredients:

• 1 tbsp chia seeds
• 1 tsp cocoa powder
• 3/4 c. almond milk or coconut milk
• 1 frozen banana
• 4-5 ice cubes

Instructions:

1. Blend first 4 ingredients in blender till smooth.
2. Add ice cubes and blend until ice cubes are crushed.

Serve immediately! It will be thick and a little gelled up, very close to the texture of a traditional ice cream milkshake and much thicker than a basic smoothie. So good!

Great optional add-ins:

Like I said, I've done a lot of experimenting. These are some great additions to make it a little more interesting!

• Nut butter (you can try my DIY almond butter recipe here!)
• 2-4 dates if your bananas aren't sweet enough

The smoothie/shake method works and sets up faster than a chia seed pudding because you break up the seeds in the blender. Important note about blenders - if you don't have a super powerful, high speed blender like a VitaMix or Blendtec, you may want to pulse the chia seeds in a coffee grinder beforehand because they may not get annihilated the same way they do in a super-blender. (We have this one and love it, plus the smaller (48 ounce) container.)