White chocolate pralines with nougat truffle and candied hazelnuts

I've promised you before to give you the recipe to the pralines I made the other day, and of course, I will! It's a recipe I tried out with a little experimentation as I knew I wanted to make white chocolate truffles with nougat but wasn't sure about how to make it pop with something special. After looking around at different recipes on truffles, pralines and candies online I mixed together my own version of the nougat truffle and decided to use whole candied hazelnuts as the pop-factor. :) Thankfully, I think it turned out delicious! Hope you guys try it out too and like it as much as I do <3

You need:

For the praline shells:
♥ 250g of tempered white chocolate.
♥ A praline form/mold.
♥ An oven grid
(Note that this will be enough for one batch - about 24 praline shells) 

For the filling:
♥ 250g nougat
♥ 100g Dark or milk chocolate depending on your preference
♥ 2dl Cream
♥ Hazelnuts (one for each praline you're making)
♥ Sugar
♥ A few drops of honey
(Note that this filling will be enough for much more than 24 pralines, if you only want to make one batch of 24 pralines you should think of dividing the filling recipe by 2 or maybe even 4)

I used chocolate from Fantasy, and a pack of nougat from Oden as I think they have a good quality and I could also find them rather cheap, but you can use any brand you like.

First of all you need to make the shells for the pralines so we have somewhere to put the filling, to do that you need to temper the chocolate. If you don't know how to do this already, I've written a guide to tempering chocolate here.

What you need (plus a praline form of some kind) in order to make praline shells.

After tempering the chocolate, just pour it into you praline forms all the way to the top, wait a few seconds and then turn the form around, causing the excess chocolate to spill out. This way, some chocolate will stay stuck to the bottom and the sides of the mold but the middle will be emptied - resulting in chocolate "shells" in the molds which are wide open for filling. When you empty out the excess chocolate you can let it flow back into a bowl or just put it on top of an oven grid with baking paper underneath it. The chocolate will then dry at the baking paper but not get stuck, that way you can just pour the excess chocolate back into the bowl and reheat it. There's no reason to waste perfectly good chocolate after all! 

After pouring the excess chocolate back into the bowl or letting it fall on the baking paper, just let the mold rest upside down on the grid to let the chocolate cool down and dry.

While waiting for the praline shells to dry you can start making the truffle filling. Break down the chocolate and nougat into rough pieces and put it into a bowl. Put them into the microwave for a little bit so they melt a bit but not completely! This is only to make it easier to mix with the cream later and is not necessary, but it will make the mixing easier. 

 Pour in the cream into a pot and put it on the stove. Bring it up to a boil. Keep tabs on it so it doesn't burn and keep stirring it a little bit so it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pot. As soon as the cream starts boiling, bring the pot of the heat.

As soon as you bring the pot off the stove, pour the cream over the nougat and chocolate pieces and mix it together until it's smooth. It will now be way too hot for a while to pour into the praline shells as they would melt from the heat, so put the truffle bowl to the side for a bit to cool down. 

While the truffle is cooling we will make the candied hazelnuts. Put sugar in a frying pan, covering the bottom of the pan and drizzle a bit of honey on top of it. (I wanted the slight honey flavor on my candied hazelnuts, but I'm not sure if it's really necessary for candied hazelnuts - if you have any special way of making candied hazelnuts that you like you can always use that way instead.) Then just wait for the sugar to heat up and start browning (while stirring it around if you used the honey) then pour in the hazelnuts and coat them in a delicious layer of sugar and honey!

There's no need to have the hazelnuts in for a long time - after all sugar easily burns and we don't want any burnt sugar on our hazelnuts! Just let them gently coat the entire surface of the hazelnut and then they're done.

When they're done they start sticking together, just get them out of the pan and separate them and if you have an extra hazelnut to spare - taste it! ;) Then put one candied hazelnut into each praline shell.

Now the truffle should have cooled a bit so you can pour the truffle into the praline shells. Don't fill all the way to the top, leave a little room for the bottom part of the praline! Usually filling about 3/4 to the top is recommended.

After finally filling the truffle shells, let it rest in the freezer for a bit to let the truffle harden a bit and then pour the remaining chocolate in the molds. Now you can either use the break while the truffle cools down to temper the remaining chocolate again or just chill a bit. Some people say the whole praline should be tempered while others say that it's better if the bottom is untempered as tempered chocolate shrinks when it cools down (the reason why we can get the pralines out of the molds later) and therefore the bottom can fall of of it's tempered. Personally I have not noticed any difference with either way I've done it, and so I usually am to lazy to temper the bottom again. :P

Either way you do it, you should now use a metal spatula and drag it all over the form to remove any excess chocolate and create a smooth bottom surface. Or at least that's what the professionals use. Now I don't have a metal spatula yet, ( I think I might get one one day), so I just use the backside of a large knife and while it doesn't give the professional finish it works for a hobby praline-maker like me. 

When you're satisfied with the bottom surface  put the whole mold in the freezer. Yes that's right, the freezer. I have found that the freezer not only speeds up the cooling of the pralines, but also seem to shrink the chocolate even more than the tempering process, making it easier to get the pralines out of the mold.

When the pralines have cooled down turn the mold around and shake out the pralines. Now, this is usually a little trouble. I usually have to bang the bottom with something hard before they fall out, but it's worth it in the end, when they come out so beautifully. ♥

Oh! And don't forget to take a bite of one of the pralines to taste what you just created ♥ I always do, hehe.






Tips from experience:

♥ If you don't have a praline mold there's other things which can act as a substitute. For example your ice cube molds. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and are a cheap substitute for the real praline forms.  The classical "cubes" are also very usable as they have a very classical praline form.

♥ When pouring in the chocolate in the molds for the chocolate shells, dunk the mold gently into the table a few times so that air bubble come up to the surface - this way you wont have any bubbles in the outer layer that would disrupt the beautiful exterior of the praline. 

♥ Even if you pour the excess chocolate from the chocolate shells into a bowl, always use a baking paper under the grid for easier cleaning later as the chocolate might still drip out of the mold.

♥ The mold should always rest upside down while the chocolate shells are drying so all the chocolate won't flow back to the bottom of the mold.

♥ There's a reason for the "resting on the grid". First of all it allows air to to come in from underneath which allows for faster drying, but since there's melted chocolate running out from the mold, if you put it on a flat surface the mold will get stuck when the chocolate dries, making everything more complicated...

Hope you guys will try out making pralines if you hvaen't before. I am no expert - I only started making truffles and candies a few years ago and made pralines for the first time last Christmas, yet I can make pralines which the people who have tasted think are good. So it's not very hard, anyone can do it :) So try it out!

Good Luck!

//Wayu