Being foodies, you can safely assume that we read a lot of blogs, have a lot of recipe books and tear out many pages out of food magazines. All in an effort to find out how the rest of the world is eating, putting together flavours and making use of seasonal ingredients. (And in the process, makes us feel really hungry!) Some of those recipes inspire us to come up with the recipes you see on this blog. Some of those get forgotten. And some of those enter our consciousness from time to time, reminding us that they exist. Like Nutella – that dangerous spread. Honestly, we never really spread it on anything – it goes from spoon to mouth and doesn’t last very long. We’ve had to ban ourselves from having it in the flat – only tripping up when we feel really vulnerable (i.e. when the supermarket has a REALLY good offer on). But we’ve always been fascinated by the idea that we can make it ourselves. Every few months, we think “Oh let’s make Nutella this weekend” and then the thought is replaced by something more mundane like remembering we have to arrange a doctor’s appointment or pick up dry-cleaning. (If only we had personal assistants to focus on the more important things in life!)

So this recipe started off as a chocolatey spin on a Diwali sweet called kaju barfi, a sort of cashew nut fudge. We bought lots of cashew nuts, milk powder, sugar  and chocolate. We were all set. But honestly, we’ve consumed so many sweets and given so many sweets as gifts, we just didn’t know whether it was worth the effort. So we started thinking about other chocolate cashew combinations and our brains also got us craving Nutella. Before we knew it, we were making “cashew Nutella”. The dream was happening! Right there in our kitchen! And guess what – it’s better than Nutella. YEAH WE SAID IT. It contains 4 ingredients and takes hardly no time at all.

God help our thighs. And now, yours.

Makes a medium-sized jar

1 cup cashews, toasted (10 minutes in the oven at 160C)
160g Belgian dark chocolate
1 tbsp cocoa powder
3 tbsp milk powder
pinch of salt

1. Using a food processor, grind the cashews to a paste. This should take about 10-15 minutes, periodically stopping to scrape the sides of the bowl so that it is fully ground. (We have a mini processor so it took us 15 minutes.)
2. In a bain marie, melt the chocolate. When it is melted, add the chocolate, cocoa and milk powder to the cashew paste and mix using the processor.
3. Turn the processor off. Add the salt and mix by hand.
4. Transfer into a glass jar. Enjoy however you like! You should be able to keep it in the fridge for a couple of weeks. It will become quite hard so whenever you want to use it, you should leave it on a kitchen counter so that it reaches room temperature and becomes spreadable.

So what do you think? Feel free to share your questions and comments below! We’d love to hear what you have to say.