My (French) sister-in-law likes to make chocolate and chestnut truffles around Christmas. They are an interesting and sinful treat that is traditionally made for the winter holidays and helps you get that little extra cholesterol and sugar in case you didn’t get it maxed-out already with the heavy meals that never seems to end around this time of the year.
I’ve never tried to make some myself, and it’s not quite the winter season any more, but I’ve offered Pierre this incredible big book on chocolate (yeah, maybe I had something in mind with this gift) and as it turns out, it has a whole chapter on truffles: chestnut truffles, rice truffles, even «love truffles» (sure hope I got that ingredient in a cupboard somewhere…) and green tea truffles, which is what I decided to try.
Green Tea Truffles
(taken from Le B.A-ba du Chocolat)
Preparation: 20 minutes
Cooking: 2 minutes
Makes: about 15 truffles
Ingredients
- 200 g white chocolate
- 100 g crème fraîche (thick)
- 20 g butter
- 3 tbsp green tea in powder (Matcha)
Directions
- Melt the butter with the white chocolate in the micro-oven at 750 W for 2 minutes stirring it at half way through.
- Stir and add the cream and mix it again till the mixture is smooth.
- Cover it with a plastic wrapper and refrigerate it for 3 hours (ideally overnight).
- Take a small quantity of this paste and roll it into a ball the size of a big hazelnut, then roll it on the green tea powder until it is all covered.
- Serve it immediately or keep it in the refrigerator
The Verdict
I was surprised that the truffles aren’t as dense as I thought they would be. When you bite one, it is soft and simply melts in your mouth. It has a very rich flavour of milky chocolate and at the same time a lighter texture – not heavy like you are eating plain white chocolate. Sadly it hardly had any taste of the green tea – this might be because I didn’t use the matcha. The green tea powder I have is much lighter in colour and it didn’t have much flavour. I think it is more of an instant Japanese green tea powder. The taste might have been more interesting if I had the correct powder and the bitterness would have balanced off the sweetness of the chocolate. Overall, I’m rather satisfied with this recipe and will definitely make this again for Christmas or New Year.🙂
Note
The book calls for milk-chocolate, not white, its picture clearly shows a completely white interior, and I don’t see how that would be possible to achieve without actually using white chocolate. So I brushed it off as some printing mistake.
