White Chocolate and Macadamia Nut Notella (Get it?)

On Monday we looked at a plain chocolate Nutella from a recipe on Leite’s Culinaria. It was a great success, and got me thinking – what could I do to make this recipe even more interesting? Change it up, of course! I had a think about different kinds of nuts that might work well with chocolate – of course, almost all of them do – and also thought about trying white chocolate instead of the traditional milk. I landed on macadamia nuts as a good thing to experiment with; I’ve never baked with them before, so this seemed like a good opportunity to give them a whirl.

Without any further introduction, here’s my recipe for White Chocolate and Macadamia Nutella:

The method is just the same as the original recipe. First, toast the macadamia nuts in the oven until lightly browned, then allow to cool. Melt the chocolate and set aside to cool, too.

Once the nuts are ready, grind to a paste in a food processor, then add the oil, icing sugar and milk powder and whizz together to mix.

Pour in the melted chocolate and mix again. Taste, and add vanilla and salt if you like.

Strain the mixture through a fine mesh sieve, if you would like a smoother spread. Then pour the chocolate spread into a jar and leave to cool. It will be very firm at room temperature (depending on the room, of course) so you may want to heat it a little before using it – just 10 seconds in the microwave and a good mix around should do the trick.

The macadamia nuts are much more oily than hazelnuts are, so you end up with a much softer paste when you grind them up. I countered this by adding extra milk powder and less vegetable oil, and the end result, when cooled, is still firmer than Nutella from a jar. It also took a bit more mixing to fully incorporate the oil with the other ingredients, but it produced a smoother finish in the end, with hardly any bits of macadamia remaining in the sieve when I strained it.

The macadamias are also naturally salty so they play off well with the sweeter white chocolate. Depending on your chocolate, you may not need to add any extra vanilla, you want to strike the balance between sweet and savoury so hold off on both vanilla and salt until you’ve had a taste. The milk powder makes a good substitute for cocoa powder, adding more creaminess to the spread without changing the colour – I thought this was a spark of genius, myself.
This was a fun way to play with a recipe and the variations are, if not limitless, at least multitudinous. Have a go yourself!