Tuesday 4 March 2014

Bake with Dizz - Homemade Nutella

Today is Shrove Tuesday which means pancakes which means yum yum yum. Fizz decided that for this particular pancake Tuesday I should make my own Nutella. Never one to turn down a challenge, I found a recipe, and set about making my own. Fancy giving it a try yourself? Here goes my first Bake with Dizz feature. 

I found my Nutella recipe here There were lots of different ones out there but this seemed like the most straightforward and had the smallest amount of ingredients and instructions. I'm not a big fan of complicated recipes, simple is best in my opinion. 

First up, roast your hazelnuts in the oven. The smell from these was a-mazing! 


Next you need to wait for the hazelnuts to cool down. Then pop them into a bowl, place another bowl on top, and play them like marracas, taking care not to let the two bowls separate or you might end up with hazelnut skins all over your kitchen...not that I would ever be so careless, sheesh, imagine! This removes the skin from the hazelnuts. It takes quite a while to do this and it is pretty messy. To be honest I got a bit bored so left some skins on mine. Didn't seem to do them any harm or affect the end result. 

Add the now bald hazelnuts to your blender, try not to have a ditzy moment where you forget how your blender works, and blend until the nuts form a smooth paste. This was tricky as the paste started to get under the blade but keep at it as it does work in the end. 

Add the next few ingredients. 1 cup of icing sugar and 1/3 cup of good quality cocoa powder:


2 tablespoons of hazelnut oil:


And one teaspoon of vanilla extract: 


Blend, blend, and blend some more until you get a thick paste. I ended up adding a couple more drizzles of hazelnut oil as my mixture didn't paste-up easily. As before it was quite tricky as the paste got under the blade, but as before keep at it as the end result looks pretty fine:


I had to sample it to make sure it was ok. Verdict: Good. Nutty. Not as sweet as the original version and definitely darker in colour, but I am excited about adding it to pancakes tonight. 

Despite being a straightforward recipe this was actually quite tricky to make. Paste under blender blades is not easy to deal with. I ended up scraping the mixture out of the jug into another bowl before cleaning the blades and putting the mixture back in to start the pasting again. What do you think Fizz? Did it pass the taste test?

Did you like this Bake with Dizz feature? Let me know if you would like me to include more recipes as I do love to bake!
 

1 comment:

fizz said...

Oops, it's been a while since I read the blog. The nutella was deeeee-lishus. Better than the original in my opinion - nuttier and less sickly-sweet. And WAY healthier. Thank you so much Dizz for indulging me.

Next experiment - nutella flavoured icecream...