Chocolate

One of my closest friends turned forty last week (she doesn't look a day of it). She's a girl after my own heart who loves a bit of chocolate. We first met in college, where we spent many an hour sitting in the Coffee Dock in Trinity's Arts Block, drinking coffee and eating chocolate biscuit cake or some other chocolatey confection. So, as part of her birthday present I came up with some new chocolatey treats, just for her.

It's ridiculously easy to make (the hardest part is waiting patiently for it to set) and if you're put off by the home-made honeycomb element, you could simply purchase some Crunchies and smash them up. But really, you haven't lived until you've made your own honeycomb. With the addition of plain old bicarbonate of soda to caramelised sugar, suddenly you have a golden mass of honeycomb bubbling up from the bottom of your pot - much like the porridge in The Magic Porridge Pot story. I admit the bubbling mass of molten sugar rising up to greet you is a little bit scary, but it is exciting every time and even though I know better, I like to think of it as magic (to my eternal disappointment it is, in fact, just chemistry and is probably as close to being a scientist as an archaeologist / baker like me will ever get). 

 

The first was a dark chocolate and honeycomb crunch square - basically a variant on the chocolate biscuit cake or chocolate fridge cake, but with home-made honeycomb as the star of the show. For those of you who love dark chocolate and also have a place in your heart for a Crunchie (which is of course milk chocolate) give this a try. The intensity of the dark chocolate is tempered slightly by butter and golden syrup, but as I started with 85% dark choc, it still stands up well against the sweet honeycomb - the secret ingredient providing additional crunch and a nice maltiness was the humble Corn Flake.

The second chocolatey treat was a chocolate and peanut-butter truffle. I hadn't intended making truffles of any description, but that morning I remembered that I had stored some left-over peanut-butter mix in my trusty freezer. The mix usually forms the base of my chocolate and peanut-butter cups (essentially a home-made Reese's Peanut-Butter Cup), which are dangerously addictive. Given that there is no better marriage than that between chocolate and peanuts, I wondered if I could use the base in another way. It's a yummy mixture of peanut butter, icing sugar, butter and brown sugar, so I thought I'd try adding melted chocolate to it, let it set a bit and see if it tasted truffley.

It did. And sinfully good. On a very bad day, I might even spread it on my toast (well, it's not too great a leap from Nutella, is it?), but on this occasion I managed to restrain myself. Instead I scooped out little truffles with my melon-baller (everyone needs a melon-baller) and rolled them in chopped peanuts (rinsed of salt and dried in a hot oven). As it happens, the quantity of base mixture I had resulted in a larger number of truffles than I could fit in the gift bag, which meant plenty left for 'trial tastings' (quality control and taste testing is very important!). Poor me, eh? I'm off for a coffee now and maybe just one more truffle to make sure they really do taste good.