Chocolates are essential at this time of year, either to gift or to enjoy. Whilst dairy-free and free-from chocolates are getting better and more varied all the time, you can’t buy everything and it’s also a real joy to make homemade chocolates (especially very cute ones).
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I’ve recently been made aware of Scottish free-from chocolate brand, Fetcha, which makes gorgeous filled chocolates as well as the holy grail of free-from chocolate coins. The factory is free-from the top 14 and the chocolate is delicious so these are chocolates you can safely and happily rely on! The joy of the allergy community in finding products like this is huge! Anyway, another exciting product in their range is dark, ‘milk’, and white chocolate callets or buttons which are ideal for baking or chocolate work. It’s pretty hard to find dark free-from chocolate these days unless you buy massive sacks of it from wholesalers and white chocolate is even more difficult to find, so this is a very exciting discovery and I have lots of chocolate recipe ideas brewing!
As soon as I received my order of both white and dark chocolate I knew I had to make some of these divine Christmas pudding truffles. I’d seen the idea posted by Nigella on her Instagram and just knew a friendly version had to be made! Yes, it is a bit of a faff to temper chocolate, coat the truffles and then decorate but they’re so cute and appealing that it’s more than worth the effort. I reckon these will make a lovely Christmas activity to do with little ones in the run up to the big day – after all who doesn’t love getting messy with chocolate and then ending up with a super cute Christmas pudding truffle to eat!
In fact, this is my usual chocolate truffle recipe with a little bit of alcohol added (I used the kirsch liqueur from a jar of cherries) to make them more festive (although this can easily be replaced with an extra tbsp of milk). It’s kind of incredible the difference that coating truffles in a thin chocolate shell makes, they become a far more sophisticated bite and i’ll definitely be doing it more in the future. If you have some cocoa butter available, adding 10% to the melted or tempered chocolate will make coating the truffles far easier and you’ll get a beautifully thin shell.
I would really recommend tempering the chocolate so that you get a nice crisp shell and lovely shine. It isn’t so difficult if you have a thermometer and a little bit of time. By all means make these without tempering, they’ll still taste great. but you will need to keep them in the fridge and they will be more likely to melt in you hand.
Christmas Pudding Truffles – dairy-free
Ingredients
Method
- Melt together 100g chocolate, the milk, alcohol, syrup and salt in a microwave or over a bain-marie. Stir until smooth.
- Place bowl, cover and leave to set – this will be an hour or two or 30 minutes or so in the fridge
- With very cold hands (run under cold tap if necessary) roll into teaspoon sized balls.
- Place in the fridge to firm up
- Melt (or ideally temper- instructions below) the second 100g of chocolate, stir in the 10g melted cocoa butter (if using)
- Dip each chilled truffle into the chocolate until fully coated and then place on baking paper or a silicone mat. if not tempering you will need to place these in the fridge
- Melt the white chocolate and pipe or spoon a little over the top of each coated truffle
- Decorate with the holly sprinkles
- Place in a nice gift box, or just eat!
Notes
