Friday, February 11, 2011

Nut Teas and Nutella

I've had a pretty bakey week. I didn't make any bread this weekend, because we're still working on that Spiced Honey Wheat Bread (another advantage of making it by hand over using a bread machine : 2 loaves!)

However, I volunteered to host the February board meeting of the Northwest History Network, which meant I had to bake to impress! Or, at least, I wanted to. So I made cookies: LeChuck Chips and Nut Teas. (Every battery in the house was dead, so no pictures. Sorry.)

LeChuck Chips (so named because when I first made them, I was playing a lot of Monkey Island) are basically Chocolate Chip cookies with coconut flakes added, and coconut extract instead of vanilla extract. One could go even further and use coconut oil instead of butter - but I'm much too cheap for that.

I found the recipe for Nut Teas in a cookbook by the Overlook Women's Club from the 1950s - although I can't imagine anyone thinking that "Nut Teas" was a good name for food back then either. The cookbook also didn't think it necessary to give many actual directions beyond a temperature and an ingredient list, but I managed to wing it ok:

Nut Teas
from the Overlook Cookbook ca. 1950
submitted by Mrs. G. A. Baley

1 c firmly packed brown sugar
1 c ground nuts (measure after grinding)
1 unbeaten egg white
pinch salt

Preheat oven to 275F. Mash lumps in brown sugar. Add egg and salt. Add nuts and form into balls. Bake 30 minutes.

What the recipe doesn't tell you is that since these cookies contain no butter and only egg whites, you need to be sure to heavily grease your cookie sheet and be VERY careful removing them after they're done. Make sure to allow them to cool completely on the sheets before chipping them carefully off. Several of mine fell apart because I didn't know this. But they were still delicious, and soon disappeared.

Since I used hazelnuts in the above recipe, and I had a great many of them all ground up and leftover, I decided to attempt to make my own nutella (Recipe found here).

Seen here on my delicious Spiced Honey Wheat Bread (now that batteries have been recharged):


Warning: if you attempt this at home, this recipe is a little too sweet for my taste. I'd recommend using more cocoa powder and less powdered sugar.


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