Many of you may wonder why cacao butter, a saturated fat, would be featured as a recipe when I’m promoting heart healthiness. Cacao butter, like most fats, is actually a blend of saturated (64%) and unsaturated (36%) fats. Most have heard that it’s an amazing source of antioxidants and like it’s cousin chocolate it adds to balancing hormones. However it has anti-inflammatory properties, it’s a strong source for magnesium, and it’s great for the skin inside & out. Also, plant-based saturated fat behave a bit differently than animal-based fats. In this recipe we use under 2g of saturated fats per cup.

Coffee….. the scent, the taste, it’s all so very enticing.

I first heard about Bullet Coffees a few years back. Butter in coffee seems so odd. The “Bulletproof Coffee’ is a specific terms coined by Dave Asprey in 2013 for a specific coffee recipe with grass-fed butter & MCT oil.

Nowadays, Bullet Coffees covers a the collection of fat saturated coffees. There are lots of different recipes using butter, ghee, MCT oil, and coconut manna/butter. None of these these options really worked for my diet so I had to do some research on what my options really were.

Because coffee is HOT, the pure polyunsaturated oils were not a best choice. That left monounsaturated oils or other saturated oils. Going by taste of what would be good with coffee, my choices narrowed to walnut oil, hazelnut oil, or cacao butter. Cacao butter won. Starting my days with hints of chocolate was what won me over and it surprisingly moisturizes the lips beautifully first thing in the morning.

Cacao should not be confused with cocoa. You’ll notice the vowels are backwards in these 2 words. The easiest way to differentiate is that cacao powders & butters (white) are from an unroasted cacao bean whereas cocoa powder & butters (brown/tan) are processed after the cacao bean has been roasted.

Another interesting thing to note is that not all cacao butter tastes the same. Just like artisan chocolates, the cacao flavors from different regions have different flavors. The cacao butter I’m using now says its sourced from Puerto Rico and is just divine.

The sugar used is an alternative sugar or alt sugar as I like to call them… I should probably write a post just on the vast selection of alt sugars available. For this recipe, my alt sugar of choice is Xylitol with the larger crystals. It’s sweet, highly crunchy (like raw sugar), and packed with soluble fiber. Most of of my daily intake comes from xylitol.

Servings: 1 cup of coffee, 12 oz

Ingredients

• 8 oz of the coffee of your choice
• 1/4 cup almond milk
• 1 tsp xylitol
• 1 tbsp cacao butter

Instructions

Make your coffee.

Add the almond milk, xylitol, and cacao butter.

Stir.

Another fun treat to this coffee is that the cacao butter will solidify as the coffee chills. In colder temperatures, you get the added treat of coming back to your coffee and finding cacao wafers floating atop. Yum!