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A quick note to my fellow Doristas! I’m so sorry I have not been well lately and faltering in and out with my posts and keeping up with the recipes, but have no fear – we should be back up and running and into our normal schedule really, really soon! Thanks for keeping up with our erratic and late posts! I have plenty of your posts to read and catch up on! Secondly, I have not been able to post comments at all to any blogs hosted on Blogspot or Blogger – this is due to a software change that is very sensitive to WordPress and Open ID users, and any security measures like captcha phrases seems to completely inhibit the posting of any comments whether I use the user ID/website option or select OpenID/Wordpress, so please bear with me  as many of my regular readers post wonderful comments to my blog and I can’t seem to return the favor – although I am keeping up with your posts and enjoying every word! Thanks for listening! Onto the post….

I have noticed a rising trend in the past six years, as Nutella gained more and more popularity in the States to the point where different school groups were selling different Nutella treats as a part of their fundraisers for different reasons and sports groups at lunch crowded around a jar of Nutella, fighting for that last bit at the bottom of the nearly empty jar! But I had never eaten Nutella.

It wasn’t until just after Mei was born when we went to a spouses afternoon tea event that I had a mini cupcake with vanilla Nutella frosting that I had my first bite of Nutella. Really, I love hazlenut and I love chocolate so how could it get any better? Something about Nutella is just completely overwhelming and intense for me, so mixing it with something like vanilla frosting is completely necessary for me to bring down the intensity a bit. I know what you Nutella freaks out there are thinking right now, “tone it down??!”

Sacrilegious or not, Nutella is often too much for me to handle and taste completely too sweet for my morning toast. But here Nutella is in Dorie’s cookbook and as far as a tartine goes, why the heck not use Nutella?

Cousin Hannah has a (small… LOL) love affair with Nutella and so when I told her this was our assignment for this week, she immediately agreed to come over for the weekend to enjoy it with us. For me, this was great! I have had a bit of a cough lately and dairy has been coating my throat and making it even more intolerable to cough up phelgm or get any rest, so someone to eat my creation? Fantastic! Cousin Hannah is sure to gobble up each and every last bite, leaving no crumbs or evidence that I had made Nutella Tartine behind. Secondly? I could play catch up with the bubble top brioche rolls that was assigned a couple of weeks ago! Perfection!

These rolls have been on my to-do list for a while and I was completely elated when they appeared on the schedule – I even voted them up when we did the recipe nominations and my heart sank when I was too sick and tired to make these rolls. I love brioche too! I often buy a duo pack of apricot or raspberry filled brioche at the store as a treat every so often and savor every pillowy bite!

I simply made one brioche recipe and cut it in half. I didn’t need a full two loaves of brioche to make a tartine for one person,… and maybe Mei and I will have a bite when it is finished… ! And six brioche rolls would certainly be enough for the four of us to have with some meal we will make this weekend, so a half recipe for each was perfect!

Last night, I prepped the brioche dough and spent some of Mei’s nap time earlier this afternoon molding and baking the brioche, so that once Cousin Hannah finished with her University classes and arrived later this evening, we could make the Nutella Tartine for a “midnight snack” – confession? We will probably watch “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” because I have addicted her to my little pregnancy terrible TV addiction that is the Kardashians and she has the whole last season to watch with the ridiculous wedding and divorce that has taken the world by storm! I know, I’m addicted, what can I say? Pre-pregnancy, I couldn’t STAND the Kardashians, they were annoying and loud and petty and once I got knocked up and those hormones started going? I just can’t get enough of them! I wait with bated breath for the new episodes to post. I’m a dork, get over it. :)

The result of this tartine and this post will go up late, but I’m ok with that because we wanted to all share our first Nutella tartine adventure with our Cousin Hannah!

Mixing up the dough made me a bit nervous, because I went ahead and melted and cooled the butter and just incorporated it with the flour, a bit out-of-order, but I knew it would be easier on the hand-kneading this way than waiting for the proper time as specified by the recipe and it made it more “batter-like” than “dough-like” I think, so I nervously waited for it to rise – which was interesting since Dorie doesn’t say you need to allow the yeast to bloom which worried the baker within, but it rose, went into the fridge and continued to rise and become a proper bread dough. Thank goodness!!

Molding the dough and putting it in the pans was just a joy and something so exciting – maybe its just because I know that the next step was going to be watching it bake into perfect little rounds and loaves, which is just the icing on the cake. I have been looking at all the wondrous shapes of bread that master bread bakers in France have accomplished and it makes me yearn to practice making such loaves myself.

Making the Nutella Tartine is actually quite easy and it just smells heavenly to boot! I love sprinkling sea salt over the chocolate because I can truly appreciate putting salt on chocolate and how it just brings a depth to the treat and brings out even more flavor than you could imagine it having before and the nuts? Why not? I usually opt out of the nuts, but with a dessert, I’m more inclined to include them. I will just let the photos tell the rest of the story, but I’m sure you can chalk this recipe up as a success!

i got lazy with the drizzling folks... :)

If you would like the recipe, I suggest picking up a copy of Dorie Greenspan’s “Around My French Table” and then why not join in our group? It’s a great community of cooks and bakers and we have a fabulous time putting together these recipes and comparing notes! If you would like to join in click here! To see how the other Doristas fared with this recipe, click here!

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