Week 42: Make your own chocolate spread

It's not always doom and gloom in this little witch's world and while pregnancy definitely turns me into a grinch, not everything is cause for a moan.

Earlier this week, I ran out of chocolate sprinkles, which, served on bread, is the breakfast of choice for my Dutch compatriots. I'm not a huge consumer of the stuff but my hubby and daughter are quite partial to it and with no trips to the continent planned for a while, I had to come up with an alternative, quick! I hate the chocolate spreads out there, particularly Nutella, I know I stand very isolated on this one, but I can't find a single redeeming feature to the stuff. Luckily for me, I remembered having the recipe for a homemade chocolate spread in one of my Belgian cooking books and I still had quite a few slabs of good quality Belgian chocolate in my pantry so I decided to give it a go.

After I posted pictures of the finished product on Facebook, I got many requests for the recipe (and many volunteers for sampling!) so here it is by popular demand.

All you need is 3 ingredients, yes, just 3!

- 200g good quality dark chocolate*
- 200g butter
- 400g tin of sweetened condensed milk

* I can never emphasise enough how important it is to use good quality ingredients, especially when it comes to chocolate! I use Belgian chocolate that I bring back from the home country but failing that, my chocolate of choice would be Green & Black's cooking chocolate. Good chocolate needn't break the bank, Aldi and Lidl tend to have decent chocolate for a good price, just make sure it's got a high cocoa content.

Method:
- Put a glass bowl over a pan of hot water, making sure the water doesn't actually touch the bowl.
- Break the chocolate in small pieces and cut the butter in small cubes then melt the lot slowly in your glass bowl, stirring constantly.
- When all the chocolate and butter has melted, remove from the heat and stir in the condensed milk.
- Spoon the mixture in clean jars and that's it, you're done!

I can promise you this will work out cheaper than Nutella and taste a million times better. The only "snag" is that it needs to be kept in a cool place and consumed within a couple of weeks.

I can confirm that our daughter gave it her seal of approval the next morning. So did the few lucky neighbours who got to sample some.

A few personal thoughts on the recipe:
- It makes quite a lot for my little family to consume within a couple of weeks so I would consider halving the quantities next time.
- For a nuttier, crunchier spread, you could try adding finely chopped hazelnuts.
- For a more fancy spread, you could try adding a pinch of sea salt, chili or pink peppercorns, all of which work well with chocolate.
- I find the spread still a little too sweet to my liking so I might try making it with evaporated milk next time.
- For the coconut fans out there, I'm wondering whether you could replace the condensed milk with coconut milk and even the butter for coconut oil. Then you could also add a bit of desiccated coconut for a bit of texture?

Let me know if you give this recipe a go and particularly if you attempt any of my suggested alterations, I'd be curious to know what you thought of it.