Vegan Flower Syrup Truffles

Vegan Flower Syrup Truffles

If you like flower flavours, you might like these frozen little goodies.

Except for the coating, they can be raw, too, if you use raw cashew butter and have made your syrup without boiling.

Pears are a good base, because their flavour and sweetness are not so overwhelming as the taste of bananas, and they blend very well with flower aromas.

You can use either white chocolate in these truffles or plain cocoa butter. As I'm not usually a fan of white chocolate, I used cocoa butter, but I'm not dogmatic, so feel free to use either of them ;-)

Also you can use any flower syrup which floats your boat; I used elder flower syrup, but you can even use plain agave syrup with rose water or orange blossom water to taste. Play around, try new flavours - you might be astonished at the result!

My truffles were heart shaped and looked quite beautiful before I dumped them into the couverture ... but the taste *with* chocolate coating definitely makes up for the looks!

Ingredients:

• 1 ripe medium pear, peeled, cored
• 2 tablespoons smooth white cashew butter
• 1 ounce cocoa butter or white chocolate, melted
• 2 tablespoons flower syrup

Preparation:

• Melt white chocolate or cocoa butter in a not too hot bain-marie.
• Combine everything and blend in a blender (I used an immersion blender) until smooth.
• Fill into ice cube trays or candy molds.
• Freeze for a couple of hours; the truffles won't become rock hard, and they melt quickly.

• If you want to coat them in chocolate, melt about 3 ounces of dark chocolate with 1/2 teaspoon coconut oil, dip the frozen truffles in and return to the freezer on a tray, lined with non stick paper.
• Remove from freezer about 2-5 minutes prior to eating.

Enjoy!

What kind of truffles do you like best? Frozen or room temperature?

Dairy Free Milk Chocolate Pralinés

Dairy Free Milk Chocolate Pralines

Yesterday I looked at the calendar and realized that this year, I have a 20th anniversary.

The 20th anniversary of my exam at the university. On November, 24th in 1994.

That's why March, 24th in 2014 rang a bell in my mind.

Exactly 20 years back, I had one of the most awful spring seasons in my life.

My mom kept being ill, I desperately tried to catch up with the third subject I started the year before, in the back of my mind I had all the stuff which I still had to read for the exam in November, and I frantically typed my exam thesis into that stone-age steam-engine of a computer. A monstrous thing with an Intel 80286 (called two-eighty-six), running on MS-DOS and having a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive.

Yep, floppy disk.

Bad enough, but 5 1/4 inch - ! Prehistorical.

On the good side, those months were the only time in my life - before I went gluten free - that food didn't make me sick.

Odd, but true. No matter what I stuffed into my mouth, it didn't make me sick.

And the main thing I stuffed myself with, was chocolate.

Not the dark chocolate I usually prefer, but milk chocolate. 7 ounces per day average, in addition to breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I literally burned my way through chocolate, and to keep me going until 2 a.m., I topped this nutritional fiasco with at least two or three mugs of instant vanilla cappuccino each night. Yuck.

In a moment of nostalgia, I decided to make some 20th anniversary mock milk chocolates. Without all the bad stuff like artificial vanilla, cow's milk and tons of sugar.

I was pleasantly surprised by the result - nothing I had twenty years back was equally good, in fact!

The carob powder is the secret ingredient; due to its natural sweetness, it deepens the chocolaty flavour without adding more bitterness. On the contrary, you can decrease the amount of sweetener and still have that milk chocolate feeling!

Here you go:

Ingredients:

• 50 g cocoa butter
• 50 g white smooth cashew butter (mine wasn't quite smooth, but I don't mind nut bits in my chocolate)
• 1/8 cup agave nectar
• 1 tsp. carob powder
• 1 tbsp. unsweetened cocoa powder

Preparation:

• In a double boiler, over hot water, melt cocoa butter and cashew butter.
• Stir until smooth and add agave nectar.
• Add carob and cocoa powder, stir until thoroughly combined and smooth.
• Pour into candy molds, or you can also use paper lined muffin tins, if you don't mind larger disks.
• Chill in the fridge for one hour or until firm.

You can store them at room temperature for some days or in the fridge for some more days, if they last that long. At room temperature, they will be soft, and they might become a bit more fudgy, but that only affects the consistency, not the taste.

I got 12 nice pralinés.

They didn't make it long in my presence.

Do you remember the days of MS-DOS and the computer stone-age?
Well, if you don't, don't mind. In fact, better forget them...
But I'm quite sure you *do* remember chocolate, right?

Trail Mix Truffles

Trail Mix Truffles

In Germany, trail mix is called "student food". Dating back to the 18th century, this was the name for a mix of almonds and raisins, an expensive snack for wealthy students, named amygdala cum uvis passis mixta.

Later, there were added other nuts and dried fruit, and today it usually is a mix of raisins, blanched and non-blanched almonds, cashews, hazelnuts and walnuts.

There are many uses for trail mix or student food, and today I decided to go chocolate.

Care for some healthy, easy to make fun truffles?

Ingredients:

• 7 ounces (200 g) trail mix (unsweetened dried fruit and nuts only, no M&Ms or other candy added!)
• 1/2 tablespoon virgin coconut oil, melted
• 1 tablespoon maple syrup
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

Preparation:

• Place the trail mix in a food processor and process until trail mix resembles coarse crumbs.
• Add cocoa powder and continue to pulse until mixture starts becoming a paste with tiny freckles of nuts in it.
• Add melted coconut oil and maple syrup and pulse a bit more, until the paste comes together.
• Scrape paste into a bowl.

This is what it will look like:

• Shape into 1'' balls.

• Roll balls in sprinkles (I used organic sprinkles), cocoa powder or unsweetened coconut flakes.