Note: This Gianduja Hearts recipe was originally part of my Biscuit Advent Calendar, a one-recipe-a-day email series in December. You can find the other recipes and sign up for the next round if you want here.
Today’s recipe is for one of my favorite biscuits. That’s of course a personal preference but I absolutely love hazelnuts and what in Germany is called Nougat or Nussnougat: a solid but melt-in-the-mouth confection made from chocolate and hazelnuts. The German version is quite close to Italian Gianduja, although the exact composition varies a little.
In English, “nougat” usually refers to white nougat (the chewy stuff made with honey and egg whites) but in German this is often called Türkischer Honig (Turkish honey).
These biscuits are made from hazelnut shortbread that is filled with Nuss Nougat. In Germany and Luxembourg you can buy it as a baking ingredient (the hazelnut content is 20-40%). If you live elsewhere, then Gianduja is perfect. This is what you commonly find here (not an endorsement):
If both Gianduja and Nussnougat are hard to come by, then here are some alternatives:
- If you can get hazelnut butter then you can mix one part of this with two parts melted milk chocolate or dark chocolate. You can also add a little vanilla flavoring to this.
- If you cannot get hazelnut butter you can make it yourself if you have a good blender: roast the hazelnuts in the oven and scrub off the peels (rub between a dish towel) if they have any. Then you can blend them until they release their oils. It can sometimes take a while. Then proceed as above: mix with chocolate.
- At a push you can use two parts Nutella and mix it with one part of chocolate (Nutella alone is too soft as a filling). However, the hazelnut content will be low as Nutella already only contains 13% hazelnuts.
The shortbread dough is a fairly classical 1:2:3 recipe with some of the flour replaced by hazelnuts.
You can do it all in one go but you can also split the work over three days:
Day 1: Make the shortbread dough (and Nougat substitute potentially)
Day 2: Cut and bake the biscuits
Day 3: Fill and decorate
Of course, you don’t need to make them heart-shaped either. They could also be trees, or circles or stars (but stars are harder to fill).
So, let’s do some baking:
Nougatherzen Recipe
Makes about 35-40
Ingredients
- 240 g plain flour
- 200 g butter
- 80 g ground hazelnuts
- 100 g sugar
- 1 egg yolk
- Filling
- 200 g Nussnougat
- OR
- 120 g milk chocolate or dark chocolate
- 60 g hazelnut butter or hazelnuts (blended to a paste)
- OR
- 120 g Nutella
- 60 g dark chocolate
- Decoration (optional)
- 150 g chocolate
- halved hazelnuts or slivers of hazelnuts as desired
- 30 g white chocolate
Instructions
Make the dough
Knead flour, butter, nuts, egg yolk, and sugar until the mixture comes together into a dough. You can use a kitchen machine or your hands. Don’t knead more than necessary. Refrigerate the dough for at least an hour or overnight.
Shape and bake
Preheat the oven to 180°C conventional. Roll the dough to about 3 mm thick and cut out shapes (an even number). Chill the cutouts again and then bake for 10-12 minutes. No more than that as you don’t want them overly browned. Let cool.
Fill and Decorate
Warm up the filling or make the filling by mixing together melted chocolate with the other ingredients. You want it soft enough to spread, but not hot or runny. Fill the biscuits, press the pairs together slightly, and decorate as you like. Let them set overnight.
Pack them gently into tins or boxes. I separate the layers with baking parchment.
Enjoy!!
PS: If ever you try one of my recipes and it goes wrong, let’s troubleshoot together. And generally: do you think I explain too much, too little, just right? Is there something you tried and failed with? Or something you are curious about? For years I, for example, wondered about why the chocolate on my biscuits often has gray-white swirls in it after drying. Until I read up about the structure of chocolate. And this culminated in my Mum and I making some perfectly tempered shiny, snappy chocolate decorations for the Christmas dessert last year. Full disclosure: I still accept chocolate that is not perfectly or sometimes not at all tempered because it is a faff to do it properly. But I will say a little more about that topic.