Infusion Series: Lavender Chocolate Truffles
It’s Time to Relax with Chocolate Truffles Infused with Lavender
Soothing, calming, a walk through the garden. Descriptors I use for our lavender infused chocolate truffles.
Balancing Lavender Chocolate Ganache Making
When using floral components in your ganache you have to be careful of the potency. Too much is worse than too little so we definitely recommend doing little test batches and scale your ratio up carefully. There are also many varietals of lavender to experiment through. Some bring out more smoke, some more sage. We’ve also gone through testing the flowers and the stems for extraction and find that while the stems do produce flavor it takes more and can sometimes pull wood flavors out.
Like most of the things we do, experimenting can be some of the most fun.
Lavender in Charlotte
A few local sources had to be pooled this season for our lavender beauties. Usually, I donate my own garden’s bounty of lavender for chocolate use. However, I found that last summer was the end of my lavenders life cycle. A new plant was started but not soon enough to provide this years lavender truffles. Our good friend provided the start of the season’s flowers only to have her plants die of rather quickly in the blast of summer’s heat. To the rescue comes Pete of Rosemary Pete Herbs! With bundles of lengthy fresh stems of lavender, our summer was saved!
Where’d Lavender Go?
As the Summer has waned we could not connect with any lavender and had to pull it. We had to go a couple weeks at the market without the lavender truffle and boy was it missed! It’s back for the time being but our Summer season is ending soon so get your lavender truffles while you can.
p.s. — we are often asked for flavors outside of their seasons, most of the time we store some excess of a seasons bounty just in case. You just have to order enough for us to create a batch & you can split the order with a friend or infusion-teammate. Just call or write us and we’ll walk you through it.