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Ingredients
- 1 1/2 cups hazelnuts
- 1/2 cup coconut sugar
- 2 tablespoons cocoa powder, or more to taste
- 1 tablespoon melted coconut oil
- 6-8 tablespoons water
- 1 tablespoon pure maple syrup (optional)
Preparation
Step 1
Preheat your oven to 300F and arrange the hazelnuts on a rimmed baking sheet. Toast the hazelnut for 20 minutes at 300F, until their skins begin to crack. (This helps the skins slide off easier.) Allow the nuts to cool, then rub them in a dishtowel to help remove their skins. It doesn't matter if you get every last speck of skin off-- you just want to remove as much as is easily possible.
Place the peeled hazelnuts in the bowl of a large food processor fitted with an "S" blade, then process them into a creamy nut butter, stopping to scrape down the bowl if necessary. This process should take just about 5 minutes or less, and you should hear a "sloshing" sound when the hazelnut butter has reached a nice and runny consistency. Once you've got a smooth hazelnut butter, add the coconut sugar, cocoa powder, coconut oil, and ¼ cup of water and process again until well combined. Taste the chocolatey butter at this point, and if you'd like it slightly sweeter, add 1 tablespoon of maple syrup. If it's already sweet enough for your taste buds, add another tablespoon of water, instead. At this point, you'll want to continue to process the chocolate-hazelnut-butter, adding one tablespoon of water at a time until your desired consistency is reached. (I used 6 tablespoons of water total-- ¼ cup + 2 tablespoons extra-- plus the 1 tablespoon of maple syrup to achieve the glossy batch pictured in the photos.)
Store the finished spread in a sealed container in the fridge for up to a week. Enjoy!
Notes:
If you’d prefer to use maple syrup instead of coconut sugar, you can replace the 1/2 cup of coconut sugar with 1/4 cup of maple syrup and reduce the water to just 4 or 5 tablespoons. The results aren’t quite as delicious as the recipe written above, but they’re still tasty.
I haven’t tried this using other nuts or seeds yet, but I think it would be worth a shot if you’d prefer to try something other than hazelnuts.