Dairy Free Caramel Apple Nachos

Need some creative after school snacks? Our dairy free Caramel Apple Nachos are a fun and healthy-ish snack that are also gluten free and peanut free.

This year has been so weird. With everything happening this year, spring seemed to crawl but July and August pretty much flew by.

I haven’t really felt ready for fall to start yet, and yet I’m ready for this year to be over with already. I’m sure a lot of people can relate to that this year!

Whether your kids are starting school in person this year or doing online school, after school snacks are a must. We’re celebrating the beginning of September with our dairy free Caramel Apple Nachos that are great for after school or anytime!

We’ve been using our easy recipe for dairy free “caramel” for quite a few years already, it’s an easy and quick way to make a caramel-like sauce without cooking over the stove.

This caramel sauce is used in several of our other recipes, like our banana cake, caramel cookie dough ice cream sandwiches, and our grilled apples.

I plan on creating a dairy free caramel recipe this year (it’s actually been on my to-do list for several years…), but until then, this “caramel” sauce works pretty great and it tastes awesome. It’s actually paleo as well if you use an unsweetened SunButter!

How to make apple nachos

Like most of our recipes, this is super easy to make! No cooking involved unless you count melting the chocolate chips in the microwave “cooking” (but we hope not).

Here are the steps to make this recipe (don’t forget the full printable recipe card is at the end of the post):

1. First make your chocolate sauce by melting the chocolate chips (we use Nestle Simply Delicious semi-sweet) in a small dish in the microwave for 30 seconds at a time until melted. Whisk in the canned coconut milk and set aside.
2. Next make your “caramel” sauce by stirring together the SunButter, maple syrup, and vanilla until smooth.
3. Slice up some apples, drizzle or pipe the sauces over the top of the slices, then top with some chopped chocolate, chopped seeds (like sunflower or pumpkin), or chopped nuts if you can have those.

Since apples go brown you’ll want to serve these apple nachos immediately, but you can always rub some lemon slices on the apple slices to keep them from browning if you want to pack this in a snack or lunch box for later.

Since the chocolate and caramel sauces are a little thick, rather than spooning them over the apples, I put them in a small ziploc bag with the corner snipped to make a piping bag (make sure to cut the corner hole fairly small).

This makes it easier to pipe the sauce onto the apples like you’d pipe frosting onto a cake, and it makes it more uniform. But if you’re short on time, you don’t have to worry about doing that.

Variations for our apple nacho recipe

We used SunButter to make the apple nachos nut free (if you don’t count the coconut), but if you can have tree nuts, you can make the caramel sauce taste even more like caramel if you use cashew butter instead of SunButter.

There isn’t a lot of added sugars to this recipe, but if you want to have less sugar, you can use sugar free chocolate chips. Just make sure that you’re using a sugar free chocolate chip brand that fits your allergies since many of them are made in facilities with nuts.

We made some of the chocolate sauce using the sugar free chocolate chips from Bake Believe and I noticed that I needed to use extra canned coconut milk. So if you use sugar free chocolate chips, you might need to add a little bit more coconut milk just 1/2 teaspoon at a time until the sauce is the thickness you want.

Check out our other apple recipes!

• Instant Pot Apple Cinnamon Oatmeal
• Easy Instant Pot Apple Butter
• Dairy Free Caramel Apple Nachos
• Apple Butter Brown Sugar Cookies
• Gluten Free and Dairy Free Apple Recipes for Fall
• Gluten Free Apple Oatmeal Cookies
• Dairy Free Apple Pie Smoothie
• Ginger Apple Sparkling Cider
• Apple Cider Pancakes
• Apple Cinnamon Granola