The Gilded Truffle

A bit of a tale here, Mum brought over some of her home grown blueberries and I didn't have time to get them into a recipe, so I chucked them in a kilner jar with some vodka. After sometime I'd got a nice blueberry vodka, it makes a great vesper, lightening the Lillet slightly. I also had a few vodka soaked blueberries, they might make a nice truffle I thought. What I really wanted was something similar to the Dutch Slagroom truffle (the best I've had are from michel in haarlem) which is pure whipped cream in a thing bitter chocolate shell. I was unable to find a recipe, so made do with a white chocolate ganache, using a 2:1 chocolate: cream ratio (hotel chocolat make a nice organic white).

The ganache came together with no trouble at all, unfortunately though it set far too solid to be workable, so I gave it 10s in the microwave, that turned out to be 5s too long and I now had a bowl that was far too liquid. I let it reset and then scooped out the truffle and melted it in my hands (hey cocoa butter is good for the skin right ?) until I could roll the blueberries in it. As you can see I wasn't completely successful,but I did have some mostly spherical, mostly covered blueberry balls, ready for coating.

I'd been given some very strong dark Ecuadorian chocolate, that looked just the job. I shaved some off and melted it. Realizing the ganache was quite temprature sensitive I stuck my thermometer in to the molten chocolate and let it cool down to 28c. Hoping that would be liquid enough to work with, but cool enough not to instantly melt the truffles.

As you can see it appeared to be working quite well, though sometimes we didn't have the best hold on the cocktail sticks, so some of the shapes we ended up with weren't going to win any beauty contests.

I had some pure gold leaf left over from a DIY project (involving neither food nor drink !) so I thought I'd put a dab on each truffle. If you are going to do this the truffles need to be set first, other wise you just end up with chocolate smeared gold leaf.

 

They taste really nice, the shell is rich & bitter, then the truffle is creamy with a fair hit of vanilla and then the tartness of the blueberry, with a solid hit of vodka.

So if you have a recipe for Dutch whipped cream truffles, let me know, otherwise I'll be using this one again once soft fruit season is upon us