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.
If you store your chocolate hazelnut snaps in an airtight container in a cool, dry place, they should keep for up to 2 days.
Good luck making them last that long! 🙂
And if you’re looking for other recipes featuring nuts:
Hazelnut muffins with a chocolate hazelnut cream centre.
Raspberry and walnut loaf cake.
Claire Huston / Art and Soul
*drooooool* and next weeks baking fest will definitely include these 😍
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They are very nice. I hope they go well for you! 🙂
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Baked them this weekend & they magically *disappeared* after 3 hours haha
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this looks super great. These look amazing too, the visual of it is beautiful. I’m definitely going to have to look through your recipes, overall do you have a favorite thing that you make?
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Thank you very much 🙂
I do like lemon recipes. The lemon cupcakes I made recently were very popular.
I think my favourite cake is still the raspberry ripple sponge cake, made using fresh raspberry juice. It’s absolutely delicious and looks spectacular.
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oh man, that sounds AMAZING! It’s definitely making me super hungry 🙂
I was wondering if you were on FB at all? It would be amazing if you could share your recipe in our group, would love for you to join our community of food lovers! Check us out: https://www.facebook.com/groups/OnlyGoodEats/
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THESE LOOK AMAZING!! x
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Thank you! The best thing is, you just put blobs of the mix on the sheet and they turn into beautiful lattices by magic in the oven 🙂
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Do you think these would work with ground almonds instead of hazelnuts? The crushing of hazelnuts is hard work plus I have the almonds. 😉 Amanda.
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Absolutely.
When I realised I couldn’t buy ground hazelnuts, for a minute I thought about just using the ground almonds I had in the cupboard. The only reason I persevered with the hazelnuts was because I’d been baking with almonds the day before and wanted to try something different 🙂
I bet they’d be lovely with almond!
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looks delicious!!
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Thank you 🙂 They were lovely!
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Your recipes make my weekends so much yummier 😀
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Glad to hear it! 🙂
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Oh. My. Gosh. 🍓
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🙂 They were lovely. When I got the baking time right they had a great snap and crunch to them.
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I can imagine these disappearing in no time at all! They look delicious and crunchy.
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🙂 They were far too easy to eat!
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Once again, these look to die for.
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Once I got the baking time right, the snap was great and the chewiness was just lovely 🙂 And I haven’t made anything with hazelnuts in such a long time.
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I don’t think I’ve ever made anything with hazelnuts — unless you count using Nutella!
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Wow lovely
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Thank you! They look really impressive but all the magic happen in the oven 🙂
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haha
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