Chocktail

Hotel Chocolat make some unusual cocktail chocolates, in their seasonal range (which the website doesn't show) they are currently doing an "Alcohol-led" White lady truffle.

That's the truffle on the right, next to it is a freshly shaken White lady, let us see how they stack up.

The savoy book gives the recipe as 2 Gin, 1 Triple-sec, 1 Lemon juice, which seems to be quite standard. If you know your cocktails, you might notice that that is very similar to a sidecar, indeed you may find the White lady listed under Chelsea sidecar.
This gave me a bit of a start as Embury has a very different ratio for this family of drinks, which generally results in a cleaner, sharper taste. Since I don't know the relative proportions inside the chocolate shell I decided to forego Embury this time and go with the more widespread result.

Inside the chocolate shell is a creamy white ganache flavoured with well a white lady cocktail, the lemon & Cointreau notes are right up in front, the gin however is very faint and more of a back note. The cocktail however pushes the gin forward and gives a more citrus finish, now whether this is indicative of a different ratio in the chocolate or just an artefact of the manufacturing process its difficult to tell (had I gone with Embury's recipe the gin is very much the base ingredient).

It's a fun little thing to do, and if more of the cocktail truffles come out I'm probably going to try the experiment over, this time with a little more strictness in the procedure. For now though if you like either the chocolate or the cocktail, its pretty likely that you'll enjoy both.