almond biscuit bars with chocolate

These nutty almond bars are the beautiful and unexpected outcome of a day of playing around in my kitchen developing recipes. Using only 6 ingredients, these are terribly easy to make.

I was making my blueberry and apricot muffins and had wanted to add a nice crunchy streusel topping. Half way through making these, I realised I had added too much butter.

Regroup.

I then added more almond flour, some ground up toasted flaked almonds and pressed these into a baking pan.

The mix landed up being very nutty with a lovely soft and slightly crunchy texture. Not too sweet. It needed the chocolate topping.

What you will need to make a small batch – approximately 8 decent size bars. I would suggest doubling the recipe so that it would fit into a more standard sized and bigger baking pan:

* I have also used premium ingredients and almond flour which is regrettably not the cheapest option, but what you put in, is what you get out.

• 1 cup / 100g ground almonds / almond flour
• 50 g butter
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup flaked almonds (I used toasted but raw would be fine)
• 1/2 t cinnamon
• about 100g of 70% chocolate (I used Valrhona)

Pre heat the oven to 180 C. In a food processor, combine the almond flour, cinnamon, sugar and butter and pulse to combine. Add the almonds and briefly pulse, breaking them up but not entirely. It is nice to have some nutty texture.

Press this into a lined baking pan (small) and bake for 20 minutes until golden brown. I kept them quite thin  because it wasnt a big batch and they are fairly rich.

Remove them from the pan and allow to cool. Heat the chocolate in a bowl in the microwave until it starts to melt, remove and sir. Repeat until it has all melted, being careful not to over heat it. You could also melt over a double boiler, but I find melting small quantities of chocolate in the microwave works very well and the chocolate tempers perfectly (as I learned on my magnificent on-on-one chocolate masterclass)

Pour the melted chocolate over  the bar and allow it to harden and then slice to the desired thickness.

I look forward to connecting with you again in the future.

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