Weasel Picked Coffee Truffles
Want to taste one of the most expensive coffee beans in the world but don’t want to pay $200 a pound? Now you can try it in my Coffee and Almond truffle. These coffee truffles were made using the old fashioned Vietnamese style of brewing to give it a nice deep flavor and aroma, plus a tad of grit. Paired with Valrhona Alpaco dark chocolate from Ecuador and organic almond extract. Yum!

So why is weasel picked coffee so good? From Wikipedia:

A popular and intuitive hypothesis to justify this coffee’s reputation proposes that the beans are of superior quality before they are even ingested. At any given point during a harvest, some coffee berries are not quite ripe or overripe, while others are just right. The palm civet (weasel) evolved as an omnivore that naturally eats fruit and passes undigested material as a natural link to disperse seeds in a forest ecosystem. Where coffee plants have been introduced into their habitat, civets only forage on the most ripe berries, digest the fleshy outer layer, and later excrete the seeds eventually used for human consumption. Thus, when the fruit is at its peak, the seeds (or beans) within are equally so, with the expectation that this will come through in the taste of a freshly brewed cup.

Human Picked Yuzu Truffles
Made with Yuzu juice from Japan and dark chocolate from the Caribbean! The fruit was most likely picked by human hands. This fruit is something of a blend between a grapefruit and a mandarin orange. Sour and aromatic, it is used a lot in cooking. Ingredients: Fair-Trade & Pesticide-Free Valrhona Caraibe 66% Dark Chocolate from the Caribbean, organic heavy cream, organic butter, yuzu juice from Japan, unsweetened cocoa powder, and lots of love. Enjoy!

I love to make things. Cooking is one of my favorite ways to do it because food can be creative, spiritual and practical. Cooking is an art form in that you are only limited by your imagination in how you can bring ingredients together to make good food. The final product can inspire and delight the senses. In fact, it is the only art form that can satisfy all 5 senses. The cooking process is like a moving meditation, one that gets you connected to nature and allows your love and energy to flow into your cooking. Your guests will taste and appreciate that difference. Cooking is also practical because, at the end of the day, we all need to eat. And it is always better to eat good healthy food made with love than crap processed by a machine.

Recently I’ve been expanding my cooking into candy making. I have a sweet tooth, especially when it comes to dark chocolate. But I am very picky about quality, flavor and social responsibility. I am also tired of compromising on one of those values as I passively wait to find the right one made by someone else. So what better solution than to make my own?! Read on to learn my recipe.

Great tasting food starts with high quality ingredients. For my truffles, I start with the finest chocolate in the world made by Valrhona. Valrhona is a world renown French chocolate manufacturer founded in 1922. They produce vintage chocolates made from a single year’s harvest from a specific plantation. Valrhona’s chocolate is used by top chefs around the world and their cocoa beans are Fair Trade and, while not organic, they are grown without pesticides. Because they have a wide range of chocolates grown on their plantations in South America, the Caribbean, Oceania and Africa, I recommend you sample and find out the right one for you. For this recipe I will be using their Guanaja 70% dark chocolate, which is a blend of Criollos and Trinitaros cocoa beans from South America. It has a very chocolate taste, exceptional bittersweetness, and stays very long on the palate. It is regarded as one of their best.

Ingredients List:
10 oz Valrhona Guanaja 70% dark chocolate
8 oz Heavy Cream (hormone free or organic)
1.75 oz Organic Butter – room temperature
Unsweetened Valrhona Cocoa Powder
Melon Baller

Directions:
1. Finely chop up the chocolate and put into a large bowl or mixing bowl.
2. Put the butter in the bowl as well.
2. On a medium flame, heat up the heavy cream, stirring occasionally, and bring to a boil.
3. Pour the boiling cream onto the chocolate and butter.
4. Using a whisk, stir the mixture together until smooth. Stir vigorously but you don’t want to beat it because it will introduce unwanted air bubbles into the ganache.
5. Place bowl in the refrigerator to cool for 15 minutes. Then put into freezer for 30 – 40 minutes so the ganache becomes firm. Then remove from freezer.
6. Use your melon baller and scoop out balls of the ganache. Roll them between your hands to make the shapes smooth. Remember these are truffles and imperfections are ok. They don’t have to be perfectly round. Also, the longer you roll them for, the more that melts on your hands. You don’t want that!
7. Roll the balls in a plate of unsweetened cocoa powder (or other toppings such as nuts).
8. Place in freezer for 15 minutes to set.
9. Cover or wrap and then place in refrigerator for extended life. But eat them at room temperature!