Nutella meet your vegan match. Perfectly roasted hazelnuts are combined with high quality cocoa to create the ultimate chocolaty vegan Nutella. Perfect for all your Nutella needs...only healthier and more delicious!

Despite the perfect picture that most people think my life is…I am going to tell you a secret…it isn't. My life is full of unfinished blog posts, heaps and heaps of laundry, dust bunnies and dishes. I have tried so many times to be the organized, put together mom/wife that everyone else seems to be…but I have failed…miserably.

I am only organized with my recipes and my blogging. Somehow that comes more natural to me than above said tasks. I usually plan out all my recipes on Monday. My recipes are typically chosen by my own or my husband's weekly cravings. Before going to the grocery store, I carefully prepare an excel spreadsheet with all the recipes I will be making and the ingredients I need to buy, thrilled to come home and make all these delicious treats I had conjured up in my brain throughout the day. But as usual, I always forget at least one ingredient and then my plans are ruined. Well at least it always seems that way to me.

On one such week and on a particularly rainy afternoon as I dragged the last of my mud stained grocery bags into the house, it hit me: I forgot something…How shocking. But it was something extremely important for the weekend: Nutella. I was planning on making my famous hazelnut truffles, but without Nutella they were not my famous hazelnut truffles, they were just truffles. So as I lay my drowsy and rather cranky munchkin down for her well-deserved nap, I searched my head for answers. And then I searched my pantry for answers. Suddenly it fell right onto my head, literally. A bag of hazelnuts fell right onto my head. There they were, cute little filberts staring at me. I had cocoa powder, I had hazelnuts, essentially I had everything I needed for my homemade Nutella.

My own crankiness and annoyance with myself soon subsided as I started to pour the ingredients into the food processor for the vegan Nutella. Soon the crankiness turned into excitement as I watched the nuts, cocoa powder and other ingredients transform into an amazingly smooth butter in the food processor. At first I heard the crunches and crashes of the nuts and then suddenly the crunching became a dull hum and I noticed the smooth butter start to form.

I decided to leave the vegan Nutella with a bit more texture in it because the hazelnut truffles I had in store really benefited from the extra graininess.*

I took a dip into my accidental creation and knew that store-bought Nutella was now a thing of the past. I say this is the best Nutella yet.

Vegan Nutella

From Girlandthekitchen.com

INGREDIENTS

2 cups raw hazelnuts*
¼ cup unsweetened vegan cocoa powder
½ cup cane sugar or coconut sugar
1 tablespoon coconut oil (melted)
½ cup almond milk
pinch of salt

INSTRUCTIONS

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

Place hazelnuts in a single layer on a baking sheet. Toast in the oven until the skins are almost black and the meat is dark brown, about 12 minutes. Stir the nuts halfway through baking to ensure an even color.

To remove skins, wrap cooled hazelnuts in a clean kitchen towel. Rub until most of the skins come off. If some do not come off it's not the end of the world :)

Place all ingredients except the coconut butter, in a Vitamix or a food processor and process, start streaming in the coconut oil and process for about 2 minutes until desired creaminess has been achieved. I purposely kept mine a bit more grainy because I wanted that texture for my truffles.

NOTES

*If you would like the mixture to be a bit more grainy, just stream in some coconut oil. About 1-2 tablespoons to get in just and smooth.

*In some grocery stores, there is an option to get the roasted hazelnuts. My local Whole Foods carries roasted hazelnuts and sometimes I end up getting those instead of roasting off my own.