Not so, nutty

 

If you're anything like me .... you LOVE chocolate! So I had a brilliant, so at least I thought so at the time, to make a little dessert for the night. Well, best laid plans and all... it didn't go so well.

Weekly, as my regular readers know, I go to the Farmers Market and purchase food for the week. One of my weekly buys are nuts. I typically buy raw almonds and roast them at home. When you're uber hungry a dry roasted nut can ease the hunger pains.

So while roasting a batch of almonds in the oven (375 degrees for 8 mins) I had the idea to toss the hot nuts with milk and dark chocolate straight from the oven. The conception was that the hot nuts would melt the chocolate and adhere to the nuts. Well, kinda. A few nuts are clinging to the warm chocolate, but mostly they are falling off in a gooey mess. Plus for the nuts to have that crunch and nutty taste... they need to cool to room temperature. Which was a step I skipped.

 

What's the solution? I think the solution is to treat each ingredient separately and bring them together. So, next batch I will roast the almonds in the oven as normal and melt the chocolate separately. Then in mini muffin tins put the cooled nuts on the bottom and pour the melted liquid chocolate gold over the nuts and layer as much as possible inside the tin

 

The hard part will be patience. Allowing the candy to cool to room temperature or not eating all the chocolate. Experiments happen. Mistakes and problems happen... that's normal in the kitchen. The good news is to try, try, try again.

 

Remember, cooking with love makes any recipe taste better. With chocolate ... they are full of love one morsel at a time.