Guess what y’all, it’s time for tea flavored truffles. Specifically, Lavender Earl Grey, Jasmine Green, and Chai truffles. Now, I make chocolate truffles on a semi-regular basis and I’ve experimented with lots of flavors, many of which have been very good. I’ve been halfheartedly meaning to experiment with using tea as a flavoring for a while, but not getting to it because the tea flavors seem so delicate compared to the chocolate and I was sure the tea was going to be overwhelmed. Y’all. I could not have been more wrong. These came out amazing. I packed up a baggie of them and left them in the carport for one of my friends to stop by and pick up and she reported back that they were bliss. These recipes are going very solidly into my flavor rotations (and they’re also pretty simple and will be available under the cut). First though, pictures of the finished products.
It’s Ro2SID, so, naturally, we have to have eggs and chicks so that we can endlessly annoy Sphene:
peep peep peep peep!
In honor of the Athoek gardens, we have the lovely green and purple fish, and the red and yellow roses:
And, since the mold with the fish also has a turtle, a Propriety Turtle:
and now, without further ado, let’s jump under the cut for recipes and process pictures!
Ganache is the fancy word for chocolate that you’ve mixed with cream and maybe also butter and flavorings.
Tea Flavored Ganache:
~130 grams heavy cream (a little over half a cup using US measures, note that you’re going to loose some of this volume in the process)
~200 grams semisweet chocolate chips (about 1 1/4 US cups)
1 heaping tsp of your tea of choice. If you are using bagged tea, my guess is that 2 bags would be a good idea
Put the heavy cream in a tiny sauce pan and put it on the stove on low. You want it nice and warm, but you don’t want the cream to boil. Stir the tea into the cream and let it simmer and steep for a while. I didn’t time it, but I got it set and then went off and browsed tumblr for a bit, so... You want the cream to taste distinctly of your chosen tea. It’s going to take longer than it usually takes you to brew a cup of tea because we are going for low and slow brewing here. Once your cream is nice and tea flavored, get a bowl with the chocolate chips and pour the warm cream through a tea strainer over the chocolate. Use a spoon to mash the tea in the strainer to get as much of the cream as possible through. Between the water that has boiled off of the cream and the cream that the tea absorbed you should be somewhere in the ball park of 100 grams of cream. Don’t stress about getting it exactly. In the three batches I made I ended up slightly over and slightly under. It’s fine. Carefully stir the bowl of chocolate chips and warm cream. The cream should melt the chocolate so that, with patience you can get it blended to a nice homogenous mixture. If your cream is cooler than mine (or the chocolate is colder, or the ambient temperature of the room is too low, or...), the chocolate might not melt entirely. If this happens pop the bowl in the microwave for about 15 seconds, or put it over a double boiler on the stove for a bit. The resulting mixture is your truffle filling. It’s going to be fairly runny right now, but if you let it cool for a bit it will thicken up enough to pipe, and if you chill it it will solidify enough to scoop and roll.
Note:
In general, for truffle filling you want a mix of chocolate and cream that is approximately 2 parts (fairly dark) chocolate, 1 part cream by weight. This will make a nice creamy truffle filling that melts in your mouth but also sets up well if it’s reasonably cool. If you are new to candy making, it might be easier to shift that ratio a little more toward the chocolate. If you are adding an additional liquid flavoring you would want to cut back on the cream. Sometimes my goal is a firmer filling for whatever reason, but this is the ratio I used for these.
Pictures time:
The Lavender Earl Grey tea I used. It’s a Kroger brand. The lavender in it was very subtle. A traditional Earl Grey would be just as good. It’s reminiscent of orange chocolate, but so much better and far, far easier than the attempts I’ve made in the past at doing a citrusy chocolate truffle.
We’ve got a local world market that is a giant warehouse of a grocery store and that’s where I got this tub of Jasmine pearls. You wouldn’t need to use pearls, its just what I happened to have on hand.
I don’t have a good picture of the chai - one of my friends brought the tea I used back for me when she visited India and it came in a bag that I dumped into a mason jar. It’s not particularly photogenic, but it’s delicious.
You want a heaping teaspoon of the tea to go in your cream.
Once it is simmered with the tea, strain the cream into your bowl of chocolate chips. I started with 200 g of chocolate chips, so once I strained the cream here I ended up with 94 g. That’s absolutely close enough.
Stir til it’s nice and smooth. Now you have truffle filling! (or, you know, eat it with a spoon, or put it on ice cream, or spread it on a scone or toast or something).
If you want to do molded truffles like the ones in the first part of this post, set the filling aside to cool off and set up a bit and get your mold out.
I got this egg mold on clearance after Easter at Michaels a few years ago. Here you can see that I’ve melted candy melts in a tiny mason jar. It’s not strictly necessary, but if you get a tub of EZ Thin and add a bit it definitely will make this easier. I’ve used a small paint brush (that is designated only for food things) to start painting the yellow details in the depressions of the mold.
For the two tone roses, I didn’t actually fill the depressions like I did for the eggs. Instead I aimed to get the yellow down in the deepest parts of the crevices, but left it so you can see the pink mold sticking out. When adding the red (or the green I added to the eggs after the yellow) the goal becomes to make sure the mold is covered and you can’t see it peaking through.
For extra structural integrity, add a layer of melted chocolate. If you want you can absolutely skip the candy melts step and go straight to coating the molds with chocolate. You can also skip the chocolate and just use candy melts as your coating. As you can see, I have my chocolate in a larger mason jar, which can either be microwaved or set in a water bath to heat and melt the chocolate. If you want really professional chocolates you can mess with tempering. If you just want something delicious it isn’t necessary, so I’m not going to go into the details here. There are two key things to keep in mind when working with melted chocolate:
1) Chocolate actually burns pretty easily, so be careful not to get it too hot. If it’s too runny it also won’t coat the mold well - you want it liquid, but still kind of thick. If you get it too runny, you can add more solid chocolate as you stir to help it cool down faster (a very careful version of this is also, incidentially, how to temper chocolate).
2) Chocolate and water are not friends. If you are using a water bath, be very careful not to get water in the chocolate. If you do, the chocolate will seize up clumpy and not want to melt nicely again. You can use seized chocolate to make more ganache, but not for coating.
Once the chocolate hardens (either because you were patient or because you stuck it in the freezer for a few minutes to speed it up), add the filling almost-but-not-quite to the top of the mold-you want to be able to seal the filling in. You can spoon it in, but the easiest way I’ve found is to scoop the ganache into a ziplock baggie, cut a tiny triangle off one of the corners and pipe the cool but not cold filling in. If your room is warm, room temperature is fine. If it’s cold, you might want to hold the baggie of chocolate in your hands and let them warm it up a little before you try to pipe.
If your room is cool enough you can just let the filled truffles sit for a bit, or you can pop it in the fridge or freezer so that the filling firms up nicely. Once it’s firmed up, use melted chocolate to finish filling the molds and seal in the filling. Unfortunately I failed to get a picture of that step. Then you get one last round of chilling/patience and your chocolates are ready for you to carefully pop them out of the mold. Be especially careful if you are doing something like the turtle that has limbs that are easily broken off.
Hooray! Extra delicious homemade chocolate truffles!
But Kaly! What if I don’t have a chocolate mold?!
No worries! I made chocolates for a couple of years before I discovered that chocolate molds were a thing you could buy at the craft store. I’m going to use a silicone mat in the next picture, but I’ve absolutely used a cheap plastic plate or parchment paper and had it work just fine!
On the right you can see the naked truffle fillings. I chilled the bowl of filling in the fridge until it was like firm clay and then used a spoon to scoop out small bits that I rolled into balls in the palms of my hands. This ends up warming them back up a bit, so once you have a batch rolled, pop it in the freezer for a couple minutes. Then carefully dip each filling one at a time into your melted chocolate. and set it on your mat/plate/parchment paper to cool and dry. The first time you try this you will likely get chocolate everywhere. Just be aware it’s going to happen and embrace the delicious mess. With practice you can get less messy. You can also roll the truffle fillings in something like finely chopped nuts or cocoa powder instead of dipping them. The green tea ones would probably be really good rolled in matcha powder!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
For the Ro2SID Exchange 2020! My fill for @crane-among-celandines! The prompt was "Seivarden shutting someone unpleasant down by being even more snobby than them."
This got a little silly and the plot is there as an excuse to watch Seivarden go, but when is that ever a bad thing. Hope you like it!
In honor of the temple of Amaat on Athoek station that “boasted only images of the four Emanations, in purple and red and yellow,” I give you candy versions of the Emanations of Amaat:
From left to right we have EtrepaBo, EskVar, VahnItr, and IssaInu. They have a base of dark chocolate and the designs are painted on using candy melts as paint. In case you stumble across this and aren’t yet familiar with it, these are from @annleckie‘s brilliant Imperial Radch trilogy and the designs for the Emanations that these candies are based on are by @nikkithayer.
I’m classifying this under the “Radchaai Holiday” square of the bingo card. I’m not sure quite what holiday it is, but surely there’s one where you get candy Emanations!
Process pictures and rambly thoughts under the cut!
These are entirely free-handed. I had mostly-tempered chocolate melted for my other Ro2SID candy project, so step one was to paint the base shapes out on a silicon mat. It’s a little hard to see in this picture, but you want to make sure they aren’t too thin - having a thicker base will make your life easier if you want to try this process.
Before going in with the colors, I used a toothpick to sketch out the designs
As you can see here, I accidentally chipped off part of the base on the right side of EtrepaBo. There was some extra chocolate on the left side that I used the toothpick to carefully carve off to get to what you see here. I used melted chocolate to patch the right side before painting. As a side note, you can also use the toothpick to smooth out bumps in the chocolate or to effectively erase if you mess up with your sketch by holding it so that it is very close to parallel with the chocolate wafer rather than digging in with the tip.
I melted each color of candy melts in its own tiny (half cup) mason jar with plenty of EZ Thin to get it to a consistency similar to a thick acrylic paint (the jars were re-microwaved regularly throughout the project). I used small paint brushes to apply the candy-paint and used toothpicks to touch things up and for the finest detail work. If you compare the above two pictures carefully you can see where I patched the right side. Chocolate is both finicky and forgiving as a medium. After lots of fiddling and touching up we have EtrepaBo:
I had two restrictions to work with on the colors:
1) I decided to go with the Purple, Red, and Yellow color scheme that is described in Ancillary Sword.
2) While my candy making stash has a decent range of colors of candy melts, this lavender is the only purple in it and I don’t have any colors that would mix well with it to darken it (there’s a nice dark blue that would likely work well, but I’m out of it right now, and it’s 2020, so running to the craft store for one color of candy melts for a fandom project isn’t a reasonable thing to do).
These restrictions locked me into a 3-tone version of the designs. The grey tone versions of the Emanations have three shades (white, grey, black), so I stared at the colors I had to work with and the grey tone images and eventually decided to match them as white-yellow, grey-purple, black-red.
I have a particular fondness for the geometric structure of EtrepaBo, but I’m most pleased with VahnItr from this project:
It came out beautifully and was very satisfying to make. The white pearls are sprinkles I happened to have in my stash and I really like their effect here.
IssaInu on the other hand... It came out better than I thought it was going to as I was working on it, but it’s the one I’m least pleased with. It’s hard to get right.
In some ways EskVar is the most intriguing to me from this set
It has a very different feel in this color scheme than in others I’ve seen. I’m still trying to decide what I make of it.
On a broader note, I imagine there are some parts of Radch Space where the idea of making Emanation candy to eat would be sacrilegious, but Athoek Station is certainly not such a place.
The brilliant artist IC, who made my gift for the Ro2SID exchange, isn’t on tumblr, but has given me permission to share this lovely piece of Ekalu and Seivarden on a date:
Hello @imaginariumgeographica! Happy Republic of Two Systems Independence Day!
For the exchange I’ve written you a lovely fluffy piece over on AO3. It’s called Searching For Treasures and features a few of the Kalrs poking around in a thrift shop and plotting shenanigans.
As a bonus gift, here’s a homemade candy representation of the green and purple fish and the red and yellow roses from the Athoek Garden.
New from Two Systems Public Broadcasting, Athoek Station and Mercy of Kalr Present: Investigation: Ghost System. An investigative entertainment exploring what's really in the Ghost System.
Happy Republic of Two Systems Independence Day @kesbeacon!!
I hope you enjoy, this is just kind of hopelessly silly!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Summary:
The idea that occurred to Sphene was simple. What if two entirely separate problems, the problem of creating credible evidence for the Conclave and the problem of no longer being able to get ancillaries from Athoek, had a single solution? Hwae didn't want those people anymore. Sphene might as well make use of them.
Notes:
This story is part of the Republic of Two Systems Independence Day exchange, and a gift for Gyps Fulvus.
Thanks for your prompts! I hope you enjoy the story. @gyps-fulvus
