Zum Nachbacken: süsse Schneebälle

In the run-up to Christmas, many of us start trawling through grandma’s cookbook, websites or social media for tasty biscuit recipes to try out. Be it in grandma's recipe book, online or on social media. Because baking together is not just a delicious treat for children. We’re all familiar with ginger bread or cinnamon stars, so we really wanted to try something new this year, and we came across this recipe for vegan Christmas biscuits. After all, many of us have vegans in our circle of friends.

Another key factor while searching for a recipe was that we didn’t want to spend too long in the kitchen. So these vegan chocolate hazelnut snowballs from Tibits are perfect. These surprisingly warm snowballs only need a few simple ingredients and are relatively easy to make, which the author of this article was particularly pleased about when she baked them.

• 200g dark chocolate (vegan)
• 370g ground hazelnuts
• 25g buckwheat flour
• Pinch of salt
• 150 ml Soya or oat milk (not gluten-free)
• 200g demerara sugar
• 80g icing sugar

Step 1: Spread the ground hazelnuts on a tray lined with baking parchment and roast for 5 minutes. Leave to cool. Grate the chocolate (don’t melt it, because otherwise the balls won’t be light and fluffy when baked). Mix lightly in a bowl with the hazelnuts, buckwheat flour, salt and demerara sugar. Add the oat milk and work into a dough. Cover with cling film and place in the fridge overnight for the best taste – or for at least 10 minutes if you’re in a hurry and can’t wait that long.

Step 2: Set the oven to 180 degrees Celsius (fan oven). Caution: Vegan biscuits are quite tricky when it comes to heat, the oven must never be too hot. A thermometer that you can hang in the oven helps here.

Step 3: Line two trays with baking parchment. Take the dough out of the fridge at the last minute to keep it as cool as possible. Form the mixture into snowballs about the size of a walnut, roll them in icing sugar and place on the two trays. Check the oven temperature and bake the chocolate hazelnut balls for 8 – 10 minutes until a pretty web pattern forms on their surface. Leave the balls to cool on the trays (they are still pretty soft at first after baking). If you prefer pure white snowballs, dip the cooled balls once more in powdered sugar.

Tip: You can also swap the hazelnuts for other types of nuts.

Recipe by Tibits