Chocolate Hazelnut Toffee Cookies

If Ferrero Rocher and old fashioned monster cookies did the dirty and had love babies, these cookies would be those babies.  Inspired by one of Giada's recipes, the end result ended barely resembling the original by the time I was through tweaking, but the result is a sublime mixing of chocolate and hazelnut, with a hint of toffee. The ingredients list is a little long because of all the mix-ins, but the cookies are straightforward to assemble.

Hazelnut Truffles (aka Nutella Balls)

I’ve actually mentioned nut butter balls before, in one of my very first posts, when I was mulling over potential ideas for wedding favors. I briefly described a basic general process for making candy balls from any nut butter (I have seen peanut, almond, cashew and macadamia nut in Wegman’s). Since I made Nutella balls this past weekend for a party, I thought now would be a great time to go back for a recap, especially since I tweaked the recipe a bit for a richer truffle.

Nutella is a kind of gianduia, that is, a chocolate paste containing about 30% hazelnuts. The generic name comes from Gianduja, a marionette featured heavily in the Italian Carnival (the festival season immediately preceding Lent).  Gianduja the puppet (whose name literally means something like ”John the pottering man”) is portrayed as the archetypal provincial Piedmontese character, honest, loyal, with a love of good wine and pretty girls. Typically wearing a tricorne hat and brown coat trimmed in red, Gianduja is the official “King of the Carnival” in Turin, the capital of Piedmont. Gianduja the chocolate was also an invention of Turin, by the chocolate company Caffarel in 1853 (Caffarel, incidentally, still exists and is now a subsidiary of Lindt). In 1946, Pietro Ferrero, also of Piedmont, formulated a solid block of “Pasta Gianduja” for retail, followed closely by a soft “Supercrema” version in 1951. In 1964, Supercrema got a new formulation and name: Nutella; and today there are nearly 200,000 tons of it produced every year!

Peanut Butter, Nutella, Cashews, Oh My! (aka My Quest for Viable Wedding Favors)

My wedding is December 6, 2009, but I am a notorious early planner, and right now I am trying to work out wedding favor details. My fiance and I are making a charitable donation to the Marine Toys for Tots Foundation in the names of our guests, which is technically in lieu of favors -- but I still want people to take home a little something. My friend Lauren did something similar at her wedding (donation to a youth reading program) and she made peanut butter balls for her guests. I didn't want to do the same thing, so I have been wracking my brain to come up with a small homemade edible favor that 1) can be made relatively easily and cheaply; 2) can be made in bulk; 3) can survive the freezer for 3 weeks to a month; and 4) can survive being left at room temp uncovered (favor boxes aren't exactly airtight) for about 3-4 days.

The first thing I thought of were traditional chocolate truffles -- ganache dipped in chocolate. But I was iffy about leaving them at room temp for 4 days. Even though, as a microbiologist, I know that there is probably enough sugar in the truffles to make them inhospitable to microbes, I have always been iffy about dairy products at room temp, so I decided to leave this well enough alone.

I thought maybe chocolate-covered brownies would be the thing, and they stood up well to being frozen, but even though they were enrobed in chocolate, the edges got slightly stale when I was testing them at room temp.

I finally came back to nut butter balls, but because my friend did peanut butter, I decided to try it with Nutella instead. I found a slightly different peanut butter ball recipe courtesy of the internet and I have made it with Nutella and peanut butter so far. Both were great (especially the Nutella -- better than Roche's in my opinion), and I bought a jar of cashew butter to try as well -- I am pretty sure it will work with any nut butter, and I'd like to try some others like macadamia nut butter, which is available online. Although, for favor purposes, I think Nutella and peanut butter are the only two nut butters that would be cost effective. The recipe breaks down like this:

2 C nut butter of your choice
2 C crushed graham crackers
2 C confectioner's sugar
2 C butter
chocolate of your choice for dipping -- I actually used the Wilton dark chocolate candy melts because they set up nicely and melt easily -- I don't want to mess around if I need to have a high-output production of nut butter balls
Then you just combine everything but the chocolate, scoop it into 1-inch balls and place on a cookie sheet lined with parchment, and chill for an hour. Then melt the chocolate and dip.

Admittedly, dipping is where I need the greatest amount of practice, because some of the balls looked great, but some looked like they had been dipped by chimpanzees. So I have decided that I will make a large batch for this Christmas, for cookie exchanges and other holiday get-togethers, so I can practice.

I've also started thinking about packaging. I'd like to have a small box of the balls at each place setting for each person, but since my guest list is going to be 180-200 ppl, I have decided to put 2 balls in a box per person. They are pretty big, that should be plenty. So the boxes I need are more rectangular than square (I have been keeping some balls in my fridge for size estimates while I check out suitable boxes), but I envision the packaging as looking something like this picture to the right. My colors are dark blue, white and silver, so I envision a white rectangle box with a dark blue ribbon like this. I am thinking an oval label would be a nice contrast, I just want to make sure that the label is big enough for a short message -- I want to tell people about the donation on the label.

I have determined that a 3"X 2 1/4" X 1 3/4" box worked great for the 2 truffles, but now I am having a problem finding those boxes :-( Good thing I am starting early...