How to Make Chocolate Spring Rolls

These are not only fabulous tasting, but low-fat, low-cal and not only vegetarian, but vegan as well.  So you have no excuse.  They are easy-peasy to make.  Don’t believe me?  Can you fold?  Can you use a spoon and a spray can?  You’re qualified.  Not even any measuring.  Kindergarteners could make them if they could reach the countertop.  (Boot them away from your ankles, you won’t be prepared to share.)  It’s like arts & crafts time, only you get to eat what you make. 

Ingedients:

Phyllo dough – don’t look at me like that, it’s NOT hard to work with

Chocolate chips – see, getting better already.  I use mini ones, but whatever.

Chopped walnuts – go bulk and buy ‘em that way, you just saved a step

Brown sugar – light, dark, again, whatever

Butter-flavored cooking spray

Complicated kitchen tools:

Clean, dry dish towel

Teaspoon – the kind you stir your tea with will do, it doesn’t even have to be the measuring kind.

And some counter space.  Shove over all those bills you’ve paid but haven’t got around to filing away.

1.  Put your choco chips, brown sugar and walnuts in separate bowls at the top of your workspace.

2.  Take your thawed phyllo dough out of the box, and open it up on the counter.  Put the dishtowel over it.  Replace the dishtowel each time you take a sheet off the pile.

3.  Take a phyllo sheet and put it on a piece of countertop, horizontally (landscape format for you computer nerds).

4.  Spray one half of the sheet with cooking spray*.  (i.e. left or right half) 

5.  Fold the other half over it.

6.  Spray that whole rectangle with cooking spray.

Step 6

7.  Spoon a teaspoon each of brown sugar, choco chips, and walnuts across the middle and just below the top of your rectangle.  You want to stay about an inch from the sides and top.

Step 7

8.  Fold the edges in, then roll down over the filling to the bottom, until you have a little spring roll shaped roll.

Step 8

Done -- all but the baking.

 Repeat until you run out of some ingredient, or time.  Bake them right away, (loose edge on the bottom) or stick them in a freezer container and stuff them in your freezer.  Before baking, or putting in the freezer, spray the rolls once more on the outside with more cooking spray.  You can return any remaining phyllo to the freezer for another time.  This works with torn or holey phyllo sheets, too, because you’re covering up all that with the folding and the rolling, so don’t worry if your sheets aren’t perfect.

You can take as many as you want out of the freezer and put them straight in the oven.  Frozen or otherwise, they bake at 400F for about 8-10 minutes, till they look golden brown.  They will be melty and sweet and indulgent.  They impress friends and look and taste like you spent hours.  They are glorious with a glass of cold milk.

Done

 *Using cooking spray means no tedious mucking about with pastry brushes and melted butter on the phyllo, which is one of the fiddly things that makes people not want to work with it.  And it makes the rolls vegan instead of just vegetarian.