Lavender Truffles: Tasty treats that smell like your nanna

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The Lavender bushes are doing extremely well and are flowering profusely. I have been drying out the flowers and using it in soap; making Lavender essential oil; even those little sachets that go into one's drawers to make one's drawers smell nice. Now I have turned to using them in food.

I found a whole lot of recipes online that use Lavender, including Lavender and Limoncello cookies. Being excessively fond of Limoncello; in fact all things booze, I am looking forward to trying that one.

I started out with a chocolate truffle recipe. It tastes excellent, if you can get past the old-lady smell that Lavender often evokes. I had some problems with the melted chocolate that I had to dip the Lavender and cream part into. For some reason it just firmed up too quickly so instead of smooth Lindor looking balls, I created dumpy blobs of frumpy chocolate. Not nice looking enough to sell in a shop but certainly tasty enough to stick in my gob.

Chocolate Lavender Truffles

Ingredients:

12 fresh Lavender flower heads
10 ounces of high-quality bittersweet and semisweet chocolates.
1/3 to 1/2 cup of whipping cream. (more makes the center softer)
2 tablespoons butter.
waxed paper

Procedure:

Break about 12 flower heads off of your Lavender bush. They should be at least partially in bloom. Add to the whipping cream in a microwave-safe glass bowl. Heat up the whipping cream/flower heads in a microwave carefully (10 -20 seconds at a time) until just beginning to show a little steam (or hot to the touch). Remove from the microwave, stir and crush the flower heads a little, and then let sit for a few minutes. Repeat the heating and stirring procedure two more times. If you taste the cream, you'll be able to taste the lavender in it by the time you're done.


Heat only 5 ounces of the chocolate carefully in the microwave for a minute, stir, and heat again in 20 - 30 second increments and stir until melted. Pour the whipping cream/lavender mixture through a wire strainer (to catch the flowers) into the melted chocolate.Chill for an hour or so, until somewhat firm but not hard.

Melt the remaining chocolate with the butter for a minute, stir, and heat again in 20 - 30 second increments and stir until melted and blended. Make balls of the lavender-flavored chocolate and dip them into the melted chocolate to coat them, and then place them on a cookie sheet covered with waxed paper. Chill for at least two hours.

I have no idea where I pilfered that recipe from so sorry, no namecheck. I cut and paste the recipe and could not be bothered converting the measurements into metric, I'm too busy scoffing truffles to to do that. :)
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