is it at all possible for an amateur?
Sure
What equipment do I have to use?
Same old soldering iron but you need to make a good pcb with the right footprint otherwise it will be imposible to solder the pins.
I once made my own surface mount PCB for a frequency synthesizer and soldered my very small SMD chip with my big old soldering iron and the circuit workd.
But after that I started sending my pcbs to a professional shop and solder the surface mount components myself.
The way to solder is you put flux on the chip's footprint and put the chip, then put some solder on the soldering iron and start from one corner of the pins and move to the other end with the big soldering iron with reasonable speed, you will notice that each pin would take the exact solder required and it will look good.
Another way (which I havent tried because I'm quite happy with above procedure) is to put solder paste on the footprint, install the IC and use heat gun to solder the chip without touching the pins.
Regards
Mahmood