Recipe | Chocolate and hazelnut snaps

Crunchy hazelnut brittle, dipped in rich dark chocolate.

After making chocolate, almond and white chocolate brownies last week, I’m staying with the same cookbook this week for these chocolate hazelnut snaps – Chocolate (Australian Gourmet Traveller).

I’m not going to lie to you, these aren’t the easiest things to make. Putting together the ingredients is simple, it’s the baking stage where things get tricky. Make sure you have plenty of greaseproof baking paper ready, cut into sheets the size of your baking trays.

That said, the end result it worth the effort. The lattice structure looks impressive, but it develops in the oven. All you have to do is drop balls of the mixture onto a baking tray… chemistry does the rest!

Ingredients (makes approx. 40 chocolate hazelnut snaps):

50 g / 1.5 oz / 0.25 cup butter, plus extra for greasing your baking trays
1.5 tablespoons golden syrup
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons plain flour, sifted
2 tablespoons ground hazelnuts
125 g / 4.5 oz / 0.75 cup dark chocolate, melted (the original recipe calls for 175 g, but this is far too much! Start small, you can always melt more)

Method:

First a note on ground hazelnuts. If you’re fortunate enough to have found ground hazelnuts on sale, congratulations. I could only find whole, blanched hazelnuts, so I had to chop them and then crush them using a rolling pin. I was quite pleased with how fine a powder I managed to get:

Once you have all your ingredients assembled, prepare your baking trays. Grease them a little and line them with greaseproof baking paper. If, like me, you only have a couple of trays, you’ll need to use them more than once so have a few sheets of paper cut to the right size on stand-by.

Pre-heat your oven to 160 degrees C (140 degrees C fan) / Gas Mark 3 / 325 degrees F.

Put the butter, sugar and golden syrup in a small pan and warm on a low heat, stirring continuously until all the butter has melted.

Take the pan off the heat and stir in the flour and hazelnuts.

The original recipe tells you to use a quarter-teaspoon measure to scoop the hazelnut brittle mixture onto your baking trays, leaving 5-cm gaps between drops. Like this:

However, I found this produced very small hazelnut snaps and tried using the half-teaspoon measure, like this:

When I make these again, I’ll only use the half-teaspoon measure. For me, the size of hazelnut snap it produces is better and there will be fewer trays of them to be putting in and out of the oven.

Bake for about 5 minutes (I found 7 minutes to be ideal) or until golden. Don’t be tempted to take the hazelnut snaps out too early. I took the first two batches out while they were still blond. The tasted fine, but were chewy. You have to wait until they start to go dark brown. These lattices will crunch when you bite them. In the picture below, the under-cooked snaps are in the top right corner.

Take the snaps out of the oven and leave to cool for 2-3 minutes on the tray. After this time you should be able to peel them off the greaseproof paper quite easily and transfer them to a wire cooling rack.

While your hazelnut snaps are cooling down, melt the chocolate. You can do this is a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water or use the microwave. If using the microwave, start by giving the chocolate a 1-minute blast, stir and then use additional 20-second blasts until all the chocolate has melted.

Cover a work surface, board or tray with some greaseproof baking paper. Dip half of each hazelnut snap in the melted chocolate, shake gently to get rid of the excess, and place on the baking paper until set.