Giant Gianduja
- Lavazza made some unique coffee drinks
- Cyrus with a coffee
- Tastes better with a double dose of nutella
Two weeks ago, Cyrus and I went to Turin for the Slow Food Festival. While we were there, we sampled many regional Italian specialties like wine, cheese, prosciutto and a type of chocolate called Gianduja. Giaduja was invented in the mid 19th century in Turin when there was a shortage of cocoa beans. The locals replaced hazelnuts with cocoa beans and Voila! Gianduja was born! Nutella is a form of gianduja using hazelnuts and cocoa as well as other ingredients such as oil and lots of sugar. Perhaps it’s the original(commercial) hazelnut spread, but many have surpassed it(my personal fave: Jean-Paul Hevin). While in Turin I picked one up at a famous local chocolate shop. It sounded good: Olive oil, dark chocolate but when I tasted it, I was underwhelmed. The chocolate is super low quality and there is little if any hazelnut flavour. I hate to be reminded of my bad choices in chocolate so I was desperate to find a recipe to use this stuff up. The first thing that popped up online was this super simple recipe that takes about 5 min. to prepare. Here it is:
1 cup nutella
10 tbl. flour
2 eggs
Mix Nutella with eggs until smooth. Stir in flour until just blended. Fill muffin tins half way(you should be able to make 12 mini brownies). Bake at 350 for 12 min.
I found 2 sources for this recipe. I used the first recipe with the hazelnut spread from Turin. It miscalculated the amount of flour needed and left the brownies in the oven too long. The result was terrible but it did use up my spread. Intrigued by the simplicity of the recipe, I bought some Nutella and tried it again. This time it came out much better although by leaving it in the oven for 15min. rather than the recommended 12, I felt I overbaked them a bit. To compensate, I put nutella on top as icing. Not bad!
Here’s the website I got it from: