White chocolate and coffee truffles with dried strawberries

I’ll first allow myself a few words to excuse my great absence.
Not been ill nor lost my passion for cooking, nothing of that sort.
Something worse.
:O

The last six months I’ve actually lived in Chile as an exchange student, on the oooother far side of the Earth from my sweet home Estonia. And with a lot of, well, experiences to experience, not much time is left for cooking and less for experimenting, especially with all those chileans around me shouting „haznos algo estoniano porfa!“

But after my first six months here I finally made something worth writing about. I expect to have a lot more to write during the almost six more months that are still left to live on this hemisphere! (Gosh, I’ve totally forgotten my English, couldn’t I just write in Spanish mejor?)



White chocolate and coffee truffles with dried strawberries
(30)

200g + 160g white chocolate

½ dl heavy cream1

½ tsp instant coffee powder (or espresso powder, or experiemnt with coffee extract)

1 tbsp hot water

about 20 g dried strawberries

(toasted) coconut flakes

1. Chop 200g of white chocolate in little pieces.
2. Bring cream to a boil and pour over the chocolate, mixing well until the chocolate is melted.
3. Mix instant coffee powder with hot water and add the mixture bit by bit to the chocolate, tasting to have just as much coffee taste as you like (adding it all makes the coffe taste quite strong, but good;))
4. Chop the dried straberries in small pieces and add to the mixture. Let the mixture stay in the fridge for a half an hour.
5. While the chocolate is in the fridge, toast the coconut on a pan over low heat (I used the minimum heat of a gas stove) until golden and leave to chill.
6. Form little balls of the chocolate mixture and return to the fridge to harden.
7. Melt the rest of the chocolate over a waterbath or in the microwave and put the toasted coconut in a small bowl (if you melt the chocoalte in the microwave, you’ll have to melt it again halfway through the truffle making process as it will begin to harden)
8. Dip the truffles first into the chocolate, then roll them in the coconut and leave them onto parchment paper or aluminium foil (I use a teaspoon to roll a truffle in the chocolate, drop it over the toasted coconut and then with a fork roll it over in the coconut, without letting the chocolate touch the bowl nor the fork to keep the coconut free of clumps).
9. Let the truffles harden in the fridge and keep in the fridge or at room temperature.

The bitterness of the coffee (and coconut toasted without sugar!) balances well the overly sweet white chocolate, enough to allow to use sweet dried strawberries that give a summery and jolly touch to an otherwise kind of adult version of white chocolate truffles. Would be nice to wrap this chocolate mixture around a whole dried strawberry and make bigger truffles, this way the strawberry taste would come out clearer too, because these truffles don’t scream „strawberry!“, rather „coffee! Yum! Bittersweetsweet! One more!“