Nutella Monday

I swear, everyone is sleeping well but me!

Monday morning I woke up to a new recipe which was enough to get me out of the house and to the grocery store for supplies.

A representative from Madecasse was at PCC in Issaquah for buyers to sample all the flavors. This was the best part of a grouchy shopping trip. After I tried the chocolate I was so perked up from the experience that I kept wanting to direct all the other crabby shoppers to the chocolate area.

I ended up leaving with 3 new flavors of chocolate. The Cinnamon & Sakay was my unexpected surprise. It is much like the flavor of a truly hot cinnamon gummy bear (as I remember them) in a chocolate. I LOVED the sea salt and nibs. I have been wanting to try a sea salt chocolate bar for awhile - they seem to be everywhere right now.

Aside from the gas I had to buy, the second most expensive purchase may have been the 2 cups of hazelnuts. 3 specialty chocolate bars never count. Never.

Yes, I toasted the hazelnuts a bit too much. It is a good thing my fingers are mostly healed for the skin removal process. They smell kind of funny while roasting but I loved the taste so much I had to quickly blend them up before I ate them all and had to get more for the recipe!

I used these darlings for my first ever experience with Nutella! I am pretty excited that my first version of this is homemade.

I don't think I have actually had Nutella before but I seem to think I don't like it which is practically a challenge as far as I am concerned these days. My younger self was far more picky about how foods smelled, looked, and their texture.

There is a lot that I think I don't like that I never have actually tried.

My version was totally fine at a 1/4 cup of agave. Technically the recipe called for about 3 tablespoons more and my understanding is that Nutella is very sweet. So keep in mind I have probably never eaten the real stuff before but I found it perfect at just the 1/4 cup. 

I was warned that when I made the Nutella that I wouldn't even want to make it into the Chocolate Nutella Fudge and had the Nutella recipe not made such a huge batch that would have been correct. :)

The Chocolate Nutella Fudge is actually better in my opinion than just the Chocolate Fudge which was the first thing I made when I got my beloved coconut butter.

Since the kitchen already smelled I then got the Blueberry Ketchup boiling.

Some more Brussels Sprouts (which I am eating in unreal quantities...I wish Costco would stock them cheap). As well as tofu and sweet potatoes which were not exciting enough to photograph.

My final experiment for the day I have been wanting to try for quite awhile. I wanted to take the Graham Cracker recipe and use it as the crust for tofu cheesecake. And being the person that I am, I wanted to skip the step of making them into crackers first and turning those crackers into crust.

Crust number one was a disaster. You know how occasionally there are recipes that just don't do well when they are divided (or doubled)? Apparently this is one of them. I knew it made a lot of dough so I tried to cut it in half. The consistency was a nightmare.

Crust number two had nice consistency and behaved better and left me with scraps for eating. I was confident enough after 10 minutes of baking to put the filing in and try it out.

Overall it didn't impact the tofu cheesecake, but the crust was just too puffy.

So next time around I will be making crackers first, and then blending them down and doing the standard crust method. Why that should make a difference is beyond me. Maybe because the dough gets all the puff out of its system the first time around.