• Keep 18-20 hazelnuts aside. Then take about 60-80g of hazelnut or as (little as your food processor can handle) and grind them into a smooth butter. We will only be using a small quantity but most food processor need at least a handful of hazelnuts to be able to work properly. You can skip this step and use our Homemade Nutella or any hazelnut spread of your choice.
• Chop or coarsely grind the remaining hazelnuts (roughly 220g).
• Melt the 60g of chocolate in a small bowl in your microwave. Remember to work at 30 seconds intervals to make sure not to burn it!
• Mix the melted chocolate and the chopped hazelnuts, making sure you have still some on the side in case you need to adjust the consistency. Add about 20g of the hazelnut butter.
• Put the chopped hazelnuts and melted chocolate back into the food processor and give them a quick blitz.
• Shape the chocolate hazelnut mix into 18 truffles and then place a whole hazelnut on top, applying gentle pressure: the mix is still not set and will crumble quite easily. Refrigerate for a couple of hours.
• When the truffles have set in the fridge for 1.5 hours you can start tempering the chocolate for the coating. If you decide (recommended) to temper your chocolate, have a look at the relevant group of instructions below, otherwise melt your chocolate in the microwave at 30 seconds increments. Let it set for a few minutes.
• Coat your truffles. We placed them on a baking grill and poured the chocolate on top of each one of them with a spoon, but you can use a fork to dive them one by one in the melted chocolate: this is slightly less messy although the baking grill method will give a neater result in our opinion (we tested both).
• Refrigerate preferably overnight and enjoy!

Tempering the chocolate

• This is our fuss-free method. All you need is a microwave safe bowl and a candy thermometre.
• Chop all your chocolate and divide it into roughly 4 parts. Keep 1/4 aside: this is your seed chocolate. Melt the remaining 3/4 in the microwave at 30 seconds increments.
• Once your chocolate has reached the temperature of 50-55 degrees, you can put the seed chocolate in and start mixing. The purpose of this step is to take the temperature down to 29 degrees.
• When the chocolate reaches the desired temperature, you need to warm it back up to 31-32 degrees. We understand that it can be tricky to stick to the exact values, but try not to go too above or below the suggested temperature... we haven't been the most accurate either!