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When I first mentioned this idea for mango macadamia nut butter cups to my friends, I was met with some pretty adamant skepticism regarding the combination of chocolate and mango. I was more open-minded about it but still not quite sure what was going to happen.

Luckily, this experiment was quite a bit more of a success than the gluten-free white bean beer bread I tried to make recently – who on EARTH thought that was a good idea? (Is anyone interested in seeing a gallery of recipe experiment failures? Because I have plenty of material at this point.)

I am happy to say, in fact, that a LOT of things went right here: I was able to subsidize the cost of the macadamia nuts by making a macadamia nut-coconut butter hybrid, and you cannot really taste the coconut at all. Plus, I didn’t have any cupcake liners (what people usually use to make nut butter cups), so we poured these straight into my nonstick mini muffin pan and crossed our fingers that they’d come out in one piece. They did! Oh, and I added only a touch of brown rice syrup for sweetener on top of what’s in the chocolate, so these macadamia nut butter cups are actually ~somewhat~ on the healthier side!

And finally, and most importantly, the mango-dark chocolate combo is heavenly. If you’ve got a lazy weekend day to spare, make these bad boys!

When making these, it really helped that I had someone around as a second pair of hands. Maybe it would be a nice Valentine’s Day activity 🙂

I used agar powder, which is a vegan ingredient made from seaweed that has similar properties to gelatin, to firm up the mango layer for these macadamia nut butter cups. You could probably get away with just omitting it if you don’t want to commit to buying agar (it’s very useful for vegan/vegetarian dessets, though!).

If you’re gonna temper the chocolate, here are the instructions I followed. I used more like 1/8 of the chocolate for tempering, instead of 1/3 (you’ll see what I mean when you read the steps). Also, all of the chocolate I used for tempering ended up melting into the mixture, so I didn’t retrieve it as the instructions suggest. No biggie.