Raw Chocolate BonBons with Ganache – Recipe adapted from @MatthewKenney
I am fortunate to know Matthew from his speaking at our TEDxAmericanRiviera event (watch his talk here) and when I wanted to do raw chocolate, I emailed him and he told me that he’d just finished a book on it (link here on Amazon).
I have made a few batches of chocolate and they’ve been amazing. So this time, I thought I would be a bit more ambitious and do something that had a filling – hmm…. this is much harder than it looks.
The images above show the various ingredients required. I am keeping the proportions to myself, as I’d rather you got Matthew’s book if you are really into chocolate, as his explanations and insight into the entire process is worth the money. Besides, his book is as much an art book as it is filled with interesting recipes.
It’s really a combination of raw cacao paste (liquor) and raw cacao butter (white), heated very slowly so it doesn’t get above 105 degrees (to keep it raw and not kill the enzymes). Then Vanilla and Agave are added for flavor and sweetness. I want to thank my good friend and ex-pat Buddy Winston who is currently in Ecuador for sending me the Raw Cacao Paste that you see in the photo – Buddy, I’d save you a piece but I don’t think these will last the weekend.
Here’s where I did my adaptation. I have a recipe for a raw ganache that is a filling for an amazing raw chocolate cake – saving that for another post. I thought it would be interesting to use the bonbon mold, fill them half way with the dark chocolate base, then fill with the warm ganache, then top off with a layer of base.
Sounds simple. It’s wasn’t. I can see that I need much more control in my pouring and my amounts. I was eyeballing it and I think that I could have been much more precise. I had watched a YouTube video where they filled the molds with chocolate, then dumped them over and that had the effect of coating the walls of the molds, then they could fill them. Well, I guess that recipe was much more viscous that mine, as it didn’t work at all – so I improvised and did the above technique.
The resulting bonbons taste pretty good, I have to get consistency on the shells, I’d really like them to be thinner – but they are pretty good.
The second to last image is of course of #HelloKitty. This mold, pointed out to me by my wife who is a Hello Kitty fan, was handmade by a nice lady on Etsy – I ordered a few of them and used the excess chocolate base to make a couple to see how them came out – I think they are pretty cute.
Making your own chocolate is fun and a great thing to share with friends – they are raw, have nothing refined in them at all and you can eat as many as you like.