I don’t like Nutella. I would rather have nothing than eat Nutella, and jars can and have languished untouched on my shelves, even in times of deepest need for chocolate.

Meanwhile, my husband’s family can’t get enough of the stuff. My step son, in particular, would have Nutella twice a day, every day for the rest of his life. All hell breaks loose if there isn’t a spare jar in their country house, for the inevitable breakfast-time discovery that the previous jar has barely a scraping left. 

I feel the same way about chocolate (flavoured) spread, or at least I did, until my recent revelation that the problem is cocoa powder vs chocolate. It turns out that a really good chocolate spread, made with real chocolate, is a totally different kettle of fish. It tastes like chocolate, not like ‘chocolate flavour’, for a start. I have Hotel Chocolat to thank (?) for showing me the light. I highly recommend their pecan and salted caramel chocolate spread. Sadly, it comes in a very restrained-size of jar, meaning I often need a stop-gap until I can next stock up or persuade my husband to drop into a branch of Hotel Chocolat on a work trip to London. Following on from my white chocolate spread success, I set about creating a homemade version.

It is is so delicious, I feel duty-bound to share the recipe right away, although I suspect I could improve the texture a little by tinkering about: perhaps some coconut or almond oil or caramel? I will undoubtedly polish off this jar in no time at all (although I limit myself to this kind of breakfast indulgence at the weekends only) so expect a recipe revision in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I guarantee that this iteration will provide breakfast bliss.

Breakfast bliss caramel milk chocolate and almond spread

Ingredients

• 150g milk chocolate (approximately 40% cocoa solids)
• 50g unsalted butter
• 50g almond ‘butter’
• 2 pinches sea salt flakes

*As with most things, you get out what you put in so use your favourite chocolate, not cheap cooking chocolate. I used Valrhona’s ‘Caramelia’ milk chocolate, which is solid milk chocolate with a caramel flavour (not caramel-filled chocolate bars). I would have used Hotel Chocolat’s caramel milk chocolate if I had any left as I wanted the caramel flavour in my spread. You can definitely make this with unflavoured solid milk chocolate but it’s the ideal recipe to experiment with flavours, as you can’t go too far wrong.

On a trouble-shooting tip, if it’s too hard to spread once it’s cooled, leave it in a warm place overnight, pop it in the microwave for 20 seconds at a time until it eases up or stand the jar in warm water for a few minutes. If it’s too runny, put it in the fridge. I found with these quantities, it was a firm but spreadable consistency when kept out of the fridge but in a cool place (in which case, it’ll keep as long as butter would i.e. about 2 weeks)

Method

Melt the chocolate and butter together gently in a small saucepan over a very low heat.

Stir in the almond butter until fully incorporated and add the salt. Taste and see if it’s to your liking.

Pour the mixture into a clean jam jar and leave to cool and set.