Chocolate and Licorice Truffles

Making a gift for Valentines takes time, which is not an easy thing to find these days but the effort says a lot about your feelings for them.

I’ve been experimenting with the combination of chocolate and liquorice (or if you prefer the American spelling licorice) for some time since I tasted Lakrids at a foodie show about 18 months ago.  I also wanted to use a soft liquorice and eventually settled on using Henry Goodes.

Ideally, you need to make the ganache for the truffles and then leave it overnight to set and be cold enough to roll into balls the following day.

Some ganache recipes use butter as well which does help the ganache set firmer, but if you want a melt in the mouth kind of truffle you need to leave the butter out.

Ingredients

200g bag of Henry Goode’s soft liquorice

300g Good Quality Milk chocolate

25g Dark (70%) chocolate

250ml Double(heavy cream)

Cocoa Powder for dusting

20 Paper foils to put the truffles in

1. Break the chocolate into small pieces and place in a bowl over hot but not boiling water and stir until melted then remove from the heat.
2. In a heavy stainless steel saucepan, bring the cream to a simmer then remove from the heat.
3. You need the chocolate to be just above 35C to create a good ganache, so warm a little more to achieve the correct temperature.
4. Use a rubber spatula to stir in 1/4 of the hot cream until it is fully worked in.
5. Then stir in another 1/4 of the cream into the ganache again stirring it vigorously until it is combined.
6. Repeat this process with the other 2 quarters of the cream to end up with a glossy ganache and allow to set in the fridge overnight.
7. Cut the liquorice pieces in two and flatten each one into a ball and reserve.
8. Scoop just enough of the set ganache up with a dessert spoon to cover one piece of liquorice. Flatten the ganache enough to surround the liquorice and cover.
9. Roll the truffle into a ball shape and reserve on a cold plate in your fridge.
10. Repeat this until you have about 20 truffles.

Coating your truffles
You can simply dust your truffles in cocoa powder or you can do as I did and use an assortment of chocolates to give your finished truffles a professional look.

Optional coatings
White chocolate, milk chocolate, and dark chocolate to give you the contrasts in flavours and textures you see in my photograph.

And if you’re an incurable romantic like me you can go the whole hog and make the box too!  Which reminds me of an occasion when I made two boxes (each with two layers) assorted chocolates all with home made fillings for my then girlfriend’s mom for Christmas.  I proudly told her I had made them from scratch and she said thank you and just put them on a shelf.

Don’t forget to visit my other blogs
Easy & Cheap Student Recipes-A great resource if you are a student or just learning how to cook.

Old Blog Posts– A growing archive of posts from my original food blog, which had 20,922,573 page views from its beginning in February 2006 until December 2015.