Nutella choccy bites

My boys have been asking for Nutella over and over (and over!) after having it at scout camp, they also had some Ferrero Rocher at some point over Christmas and have been asking about the ‘gold chocolate balls’ ever since, so… I came up with this recipe!

Ingredients:

2 cups of hazelnuts
150g of dark chocolate

How to make:

Lightly roast 2 cups of hazelnuts at 190 degree C for around 10 minutes to develop their delicious nutty flavour and assist with blending.
Allow them to cool slightly, remove some of the skins if you like (no need if you don’t want to) and then pop into the food processor and blend, blend, blend! It will take a good 5 minutes even with a grunty machine to get them like fine breadcrumbs.
Melt 150g of dark chocolate and add to the blender then, continue to blend. I blended until the mix was quite smooth, but you can leave it chunkier if you prefer.
Pop the mixture into small cupcake moulds and then chill.
Decorate if you like with a little more melted dark chocolate and some chopped nuts.

They are seriously tasty! I did think about making my own smooth Nutella, but then figured it would only get eaten out the jar (probably by me ) and spread on bread or crackers and honestly, there are other things I would rather eat on those, so, enjoying the taste this way seemed to be a win win!

As a side note, other than the obvious sugar/fat combo, I hands down refuse to buy Nutella for these reasons:

I do whatever I can to avoid unsustainable sources of palm oil, usually when you see ‘vegetable oil’ on the ingredients list, it means palm oil.
Back in my binging/bulimic years, I could eat a big jar of Nutella in one go, and even now, along with squirty cream and ice cream, it is something that cannot be in the house, because old habits can die hard and sometimes it is best to avoid the triggers.