Coconutella

After my spreadable butter success I have realised that making spreadable spreads is addictive. So is Pinterest. Finding recipes on Pinterest and making them is addictive. The nutella microwave mug cake recipe I found on pinterest is so addictive that it’s dangerous. I am not a massive nutella fan, but I did end up buying it simply to make the microwave mug cake. I’m that kind of person, I have an addictive kind of personality. I was pretty excited about my delicious nutella microwave mug cake, untilI read the ingredients list on Nutella.

Sugar, vegetable oil, hazelnuts (13%), cocoa powder (7.4%), non-fat milk solids, emulsifier (soy lecithin), flavour (vanillin)

Just in case you are wondering the vegetable oil listed is palm oil, and since there is nothing mentioning that it is fair trade I’m going to go ahead and assume that it is not fair trade and that it is also highly refined palm oil. If you’re wondering why the use of palm oil bothers me check out this info on orang-utans.

Finding out that a supposedly healthy spread is only 13% hazel nuts and primarily sugar and palm oil is not a happy moment. In saying that I would happily go without, but my husband has a bit of a crush on nutella and I feel he has been having a closed doors affair with it behind my back because the tub I bought was full one day and almost empty the next. My microwave nutella mug cake has nothing to do with it of course…

Luckily, Pinterest provided me with a solution in the form of a recipe for home made nutella. I was excited! Until I realised I didn’t have chocolate or hazelnuts in the house. I also did not have milk powder… and come to think of it, how healthy is chocolate anyway? Back to the drawing board.

I decided to make up my own recipe based on ingredients I had, hopefully not a recipe for disaster. I muddled around with ingredients I had in the fridge, I tried to stick to healthy or whole foods. The resulting spread was not much like nutella (lacking the essential hazelnuts and chocolate) but instead tasted like a creamy coconut rough spread. It was scrummy! Here is the recipe.

Coconutella Recipe

1.5 cups of toasted almonds

3 heaping teaspoons of cocoa powder

¾ cup of milk

50gms of butter

50gms of coconut oil, maybe less. I can’t be sure. It was a chunk.

½ cup honey

These measurements are all approximate, I tend to just lug things in and hope for the best. Depending on the temperature of your fridge you may want to play with the ratios a bit. More milk will make it softer and more butter or coconut oil will make it firmer.

I toasted the almonds until they were golden, okay that’s a bit of a lie, I almost burned them. But they were still nice. Then I used my coffee grinder to grind them as fine as possible. After that I put the almonds in my blender with the coconut oil, honey and butter. In a saucepan I heated up the milk with the cocoa powder until it was bubbling around the edges. It’s important to heat the cocoa powder so that it doesn’t taste awful and goes a nice dark colour. I poured the hot milk over the mix and blended it. And blended it. And blended it… and then my machine started smoking, so I stopped. The resulting mix was quite liquidy but set pretty well in the fridge. The coconut oil had given it an amazing taste, like bounty bars or coconut rough. Not at all like nutella but something familiar and chocolatey.

I consider it a success.