Over Christmas a friend gave me some unshelled walnuts. Recently another friend gave me more. So, this week I began a search for a new biscuit recipe containing walnuts. I came across a recipe for Healthy Peanut Butter Cookies at eatingbirdfood.com. Normally I look past recipes made with peanuts as I am intolerant. But this time I wondered what they would taste like if I made a the walnuts into a paste to replace the peanut butter.
One evening this week I sat down with the walnuts and proceeded to crack the shells using a nut cracker. As I attempted to break them open, I broke the nuts too, and I couldn’t separate all the nuts from the shells. I ended up with sore fingers and a mix of walnut pieces and cracked shells in the same bowl. Never again! The next day I took the bowl outside in the sunlight and picked out the walnut pieces. I had to add a bag of hulled walnut to the mix to give me enough for my recipe after my failed walnut cracking effort.
I placed the walnuts in my food processor and processed until the nuts were ground to a paste. I had to stop the processor and knock the crumbs from the walls of the bowl frequently so that they fell on to the blades. It took about 5 minutes of processing in all, but it worked.
The original recipe uses almond flour which I replaced with hazelnut meal. I increased the other ingredients to match my quantities of walnut paste and hazelnut meal.
The result is delicious! The biscuits have a rich, nutty flavour and although nutritious, are highly calorific, so my advice is to make them small.
Here is my version of the recipe. I hope you enjoy them.
Ingredients:
Method:
Place the walnut paste, hazelnut meal, maple syrup and vanilla essence in a bowl. Mix the ingredients to combine them thoroughly. I used a hand mixer for this.
Form small balls of the mixture and place them on oven trays lined with baking paper. Using a fork, press each biscuit down to flatten. Sprinkle each biscuit with a small amount of the sea salt.
Place the trays in a pre-heated oven at 180 degrees Celsius for 12 to 15 minutes, or until they brown slightly.
When the biscuits are cooked, remove them from the oven to cool.
Makes about 60 small biscuits.
