Vegan Chocolate Graze Board for Valentine’s Day

How do you celebrate Valentine’s Day?

I’m not the biggest fan of Valentine’s Day… in my mind, if you have special people in your life, you should tell them that more often than once a year. It’s nice to make the ones you love feel special on say, a random Tuesday, not on just February 14.

Having said all of that, this past year has been a tough one for businesses, so if you can figure out a way to support a local business, that’s not a bad thing!

A couple local favourites of mine include:

• Beetbox Veg is doing a dozen vegan chicken tenders in a really beautiful wrapper for $24. These are so good! Much yummier than flowers!
• Rocky Mountain Flatbread is offering DIY pizza kits, with everything you need to make your own pizza at home. I got one for me and one for my bestie, and we had a pizza making “Galentine’s Day” date over Zoom. They have vegan and gluten free options, as well as at-home cocktail kits as well!
• Hot Chocolate Festival ends on Valentine’s Day. It’s been a fun month sampling different hot chocolates around the city, and there are loads of vegan options.
• You could also bake something sweet and drop it off to your friends or family. Here are some of my favourite Valentine’s Day recipes.

But as we all know, Valentine’s Day is also alllll about the chocolate. Charcuterie or Graze Boards made a big comeback in 2020. They’re so pretty, they took over Instagram, but also, they are fun to make and provide a communal experience with your bubble mates.

For Valentine’s Day, I did a Chocolate Graze Board, and it’s completely vegan!

The centrepiece of this board is, of course, chocolate! Here, I’m using Green & Black’s Dark Chocolate. In general, dark chocolate (anything say, 65-70% cocoa mass or above) tends to be vegan (meaning no milk is added). You do have to be careful if you have a dairy allergy, as there can be some cross contamination. For mine, I used a plain dark chocolate and I also used Maya Gold, which contains orange, cinnamon and nutmeg. It makes a nice compliment to the dried fruits on my Chocolate Graze Board.

Here’s how to make a Chocolate Graze Board:

1. Pick a beautiful platter or board to build on. Here, I used a piece of marble, but a nice wooden cutting board or something similar would work great.
2. Start with your focus ingredient. In this case, it was the chocolate, so I put that right in the middle, and then in a few other places on the outsides.
3. Begin to build. I like to draw lines, make shapes with my ingredients.
4. Some ingredient ideas:
   • dried fruits
   • fresh fruits and berries (you can cut them so they look prettier)
   • nuts
   • cookies
   • pretzels
   • coconut chips

5. Just go for it! There’s no wrong way! If you don’t like how something looks, you can just take it off and put it somewhere else.
6. Serve your board and bask in the oooohs and ahhhhs!

If you make something like this, please tag me @rebeccacoleman in your post on instagram so I can see it!

Happy Valentine’s Day!