Melt in the mouth, soft, silky smooth, luscious, dark chocolate brownies studded with crispy roast hazelnuts and chunks of creamy milk chocolate. Replacing the flour with ground roast hazelnuts helps create a flavour deliciously reminiscent of Nutella with the added benefit that these brownies are gluten-free. Makes 9 or 16
Collect together your equipment (see Recipe Notes below) and ingredients.
Preheat oven to fan oven 160°C /180°C/350°F/Gas 4
Scatter the hazelnuts on a baking tray and bake in the centre of a preheated oven for 8 minutes, stirring after 4 minutes. Remove from the oven and allow to cool. When you take them out of the oven, turn it up to fan oven 170°C /190°C/375°F/Gas 5.
Weigh half of the hazelnuts into a food processor and blitz until they are the consistency of ground almonds. Be careful not to over blitz or they will become hazelnut butter. Set the remaining whole hazelnuts aside.
Chop the butter into squares and place in a microwave safe bowl with the chopped chocolate. Melt in a microwave or a bain marie or and mix until smooth. (See Recipe Notes for details.)
Meanwhile put the sugars, eggs and salt in a mixing bowl and whisk with an electric whisk until thick and creamy. This will take around 3 minutes.
Pour the chocolate and butter into the eggs and sugar, whilst whisking, and mix thoroughly with the electric whisk until smooth and glossy.
Tip in the ground hazelnuts.
Put a sieve over the bowl and add the cocoa and coffee. Sift directly over the cake batter and fold until nearly mixed in.
Add the whole hazelnuts and chopped milk chocolate and fold in. Be careful not to over-mix at this stage.
Transfer to your baking tin and level the surface, making sure the cake batter goes all the way into the corners.
Cook in the oven for 20 – 25 minutes, depending on how squidgy you like the centre to be. It will carry on cooking when you take it out of the oven so bear this in mind. (I cook mine for 23 minutes in London and 24 minutes in Switzerland.)
Leave to cool in the tin for 30 minutes and then, using the overhanging parchment, transfer the brownies to a cooling rack – do not remove the parchment, they will be too fragile.
Leave to cool completely before cutting into squares.
N.B. To speed up the cooling process and/or create particularly neat edges when cutting, transfer to a fridge to cool and slice when very cool. However, they are best served at room temperature.
Equipment
Be very careful melting the chocolate. Chocolate can be very difficult to work with. You can overheat it very easily and the mixture will go grainy. When this happens, there is no way to resolve it I’m afraid!
Microwave: I give the chocolate and butter a minute in the microwave, take it out and stir it well, then let it sit for a few minutes to see if it continues melting sufficiently to melt all the chocolate. If not, I then continue with the microwave but in 10 – 15 second bursts.
Bain Marie: if you do not have a microwave, put the chocolate and butter in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of gently simmering water. Do not let the base of the bowl touch the water. Heat until the chocolate and butter are very nearly melted then take it off the heat and take the bowl off the saucepan. Be very careful not to burn yourself as the bowl will be hot and steam will escape from the saucepan. Allow the mixture to sit for a few minutes for the residual heat to melt the remainder of the mixture. Again, be careful not to over-heat.