It is the season of comfort food, and with this comes lots of chocolate! Our new Milk Chocolate Hazelnut Bark is a recipe based on a baked good we had while we were visiting Boston. The Flour Bakery’s Milk Chocolate Hazelnut Cookie was the inspiration. The discovery of the Flour Bakery itself comes from Kyle’s days in culinary school. One of his friends hailed from Boston and always spoke highly of Flour Bakery. This friend attended a baking class conducted by the owner of the bakery, so the recipes came to school with him, allowing Kyle to get his first taste from this delicious shop.
The Flour Bakery’s Milk Chocolate Hazelnut Cookie is a baked good that encapsulates sweet-and-salty perfection with creamy milk chocolate and toasted hazelnuts, in two forms, chunks of chopped hazelnuts folded throughout the cookies and pulverized hazelnut “flour” mixed with AP flour.
Kyle’s hope was to recreate these cookies and add them into his Christmas Cookie Repertoire. It didn’t go as planned since recreating them with AP flour was pretty straightforward but adapting them into a gluten free version proved especially challenging.
Multiple batches fell victim to the infamous gluten free cookie blob so many of us are familiar with when baking. All of the cookies tended to spread together into a giant congealed mess. We suspect that the pulverized hazelnuts mixed into the dry ingredients created a very delicate dough. This isn’t an issue when baking with traditional all-purpose flour, but can be tricky when using gluten free alternatives. Our tried-and-true and (almost) invincible GF Cookie Dough Flour was no match for this recipe.
Of course, this did not deter Kyle! He tinkered with the recipe trying to create a gluten free version. After several batches, and Christmases, he eventually landed on a decent recipe, but it was nothing to write home (or on the Internet) about. In a nutshell, our Chocolate Fudge Cookie recipe was used, and he swapped in milk chocolate or the melted dark chocolate and adjusted the flour ratio a bit. The pulverized hazelnuts were completely abandoned.
Instead, he relied on the chopped chunks of hazelnuts folded into the dough to give these cookies all the hazelnut flavor. While the final cookies were tasty, they didn’t really seem worth all the effort. Basically, the whole ordeal was a faff (a new favorite word from The Great British Bake Off).
Moving on from the GF Chocolate Hazelnut Cookie Quest, culinary obsessions began to be focused elsewhere. This past holiday season, while making some batches of chocolate bark, the flavor combination from the cookies was revisited and Milk Chocolate Hazelnut Bark was born.
Only three ingredients were needed, one of which is salt. This bark recipe is both simple to prepare and naturally gluten free, so, no need to meddle with pesky GF conversions. The bark is the perfect way to capture all the sweet-and-salty flavors and crunchy textures of the beloved cookie, just in an alternate format. There was finally closure from the hazelnut cookie letdown.
The same melting technique was used that was previously highlighted in other Allons-Eat! bark posts. This consists of melting most of the chocolate together in the double boiler, removing the melted chocolate from the heat, then stirring in the remaining chocolate until completely melted. This simple, yet foolproof technique leads to beautifully tempered chocolate with a significant SNAP! when you bite into it. No need to rely on thermometers or other finicky techniques.
To load up on the hazelnut flavor, Kyle stirred some toasted and chopped hazelnuts directly into the melted chocolate and then scattered a second portion of hazelnuts over the bark once it was spread into the pan. A generous dusting of flaky salt rounded out the sweet-and-salty, nutty-and-crunchy excellence that Kyle was attempting to mirror from the Chocolate Hazelnut Cookies.
There was no new cookie added to the holiday repertoire, however, something just as delicious came out of all that trial and error – the ever-scrumptious Milk Chocolate Hazelnut Bark! This particular sweet treat can be added to many other holiday baking lineups besides Christmas – Valentine’s Day is coming, right?
- 12 ounce package (about 2 cups) milk chocolate chips
- 4 ounces (about 1 cup) toasted and chopped hazelnuts
- Flaky sea salt, for garnish
- Line a 9 x 13-inch pan with parchment paper.
- Melt about ¾ of the chocolate (it doesn’t have to be exact) in a medium heatproof bowl set over a pan of simmering water.
- Remove the bowl from the heat and stir in reserved chocolate chips until mixture is completely melted and smooth. Stir in half of the chopped hazelnuts.
- Spread the chocolate and hazelnut mixture evenly into the prepared pan. Sprinkle with the reserved hazelnuts and flaky sea salt. Gently press the hazelnuts into the chocolate mixture so they adhere to the bark.
- Refrigerate until the bark has set, about 1 hour, then break into pieces. Bark is best stored in the fridge.
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