Homemade Chocolate Sprinkles Recipe- Vegan

Banana peanut butter healthy
 homemade ice cream, topped
with homemade chocolate sprinkles

There are certain foods we eat for nourishment, and then there are foods that are certainly not eaten for health benefits, or even because they're necesary at all, but rather, because they make life more fun. Frosting and sprinkles are two of those things. They're just cool, and liven up many a dish, whether ice cream, cakes, cookies, or elsewise.
Sprinkles are also something that I haven't once bought in the nearly 6 years I'm living here, as they're very expensive here, not to mention, usually filled with all sorts of kooky ingredients. My kids, I have to admit, haven't been too thrilled about that, as they're kids after all, and kids seem to love eating everything they shouldn't be eating, especially if its a fun food.

Well, little Ike has a birthday coming up very soon, and, in honor of this celebration, I decided to experiment with a recipe/idea reader Debbie M emailed me a few months back- homemade sprinkles, so that hopefully I'll be able to use them for his cake. The recipe I was sent wasn't for chocolate sprinkles, and it contained food coloring. I wanted to experiment to come up with a recipe that had no need for food coloring (whether artificial or real), so completely made up this recipe from scratch, keeping the technique the same.
The recipe was a complete success! My kids loved them! They weren't hard to make. This is definitely going in my file to make again and again and again.

Typical homemade sprinkles are made with royal icing, containing egg whites or egg white powder, but since I'm temporarily off eggs (on top of everything else I'm already off of), I decided to make these egg free. Instead of using egg whites to harden these, I used a little bit of vodka, as I saw in a different sprinkle recipe on Chocolatecoveredkatie.com.
You can also use this recipe to make a chocolate/brown royal icing.
The recipe calls for powdered sugar- you can make your own by whizzing regular white sugar in a coffee grinder for a few minutes, and you can also make healthier powdered sugar by whizzing coconut sugar, sucanat, or xylitol in a coffee grinder, but I haven't tried those in this recipe, only regular white sugar made into powdered sugar. If you want to try it out with those alternative powdered sugars, let me know please how they come out.

Homemade Chocolate Sprinkles Recipe

Ingredients
1/2 cup powdered sugar
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
4 teaspoons vanilla infused vodka + 2 teaspoons water
Or 6 tablespoons of liquid, whether vodka, vanilla extract, water, or any combination of those

Instructions:
1. Mix the powdered sugar and cocoa powder very well.

2. Add the liquid, and mix well, encorporating everything. You'll get a thick but workable frosting like mixture.

3. Put your icing into a plastic sandwich bag, removing as much air as possible, then tying shut. With a scissors, snip a tiny, tiny hole into one corner of the bag.

4. Lay a piece of parchment paper down on a flat surface, then squeeze long straight lines of icing onto the parchment paper.

5. Make more and more parallel lines of icing on your parchment paper, making sure they don't touch.

It's ok if the lines aren't perfectly straight. Either fill up the whole paper with very closely spaced lines, as I did, or when the sheet gets full, move on to a new sheet of parchment paper.

6. Let dry up to 24 hours undisturbed. If you used mostly vodka as the liquid, this will dry faster, as it will if you live in a warm, non humid place. If you use water or your home is colder, this will take more time. Let it dry until you have hard sticks that flake off the parchment paper easily. I let mine sit only about 10 hours.

7. Pick up the side of the parchment paper, and start rolling it, so that the sprinkle sticks detach from the parchment paper and end up in the middle.

8. Make a pile of all the sprinkle sticks, making sure they all are facing the same direction.

9. With a non serrated knife, cut the pile of sprinkle sticks into little sprinkles, each about a quarter of an inch long.

These now are your sprinkles. Use as you would any other sprinkles. Keep them in a dry place. They don't spoil. I'm thinking of using an old spice shaker to have a sprinkle shaker.

This was my breakfast this morning. My kids loved it, and so did I! Pretty healthy as well. It was made from frozen reduced rack bananas, unsweetened plain peanut butter (single ingredient peanut butter, not even salt), and a pinch of salt, and then sprinkled with the sprinkles. It felt so good to have such an indulgence- and for breakfast- and have no guilt at all about it.

Are you a sprinkle user? What types of sprinkles do you use most? Chocolate or colored? How do you use your sprinkles, other than ice cream and cake decorating? Have you ever made sprinkles before? Does this look like the type of recipe you'd try out?

How do you think your kids would react if you made homemade sprinkles?

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