Over the years, I've made many different Easter eggs. Peanut butter fudge, Cadbury creme egg dupes, strawberry cream, orange creamsicle, Oreo cookie, potato chip, Rice Krispies, peanut gianduja... They've all been delicious and it would be easy to just pick one and repeat it (especially a peanut butter one). But Tuesday night chocolate study and this blog aren't about what's easy! They're about trying new things and learning in the process. And so as much as I'd like to be making myself a gianduja bunny again, this year's Easter eggs will instead have a dark chocolate raspberry ganache filling.
Now, I've experimented with ganache a fair amount, particularly with alcohol as the flavouring. Beer, cider, port wine, Cointreau, brandy... I've also made a variety of truffles flavoured with oils (peppermint, orange, key lime, lemon, strawberry), and even a few that used pulverized freeze-dried fruit. But I can't recall making a truffle with fruit puree (though I certainly used fruit purees in buttercream frosting when I was doing more cake decorating).
In preparation for my Tuesday night chocolate study, I reviewed a number of recipes. I settled on a recipe in the Ewald Notter book The Art of the Chocolatier as a base recipe upon which I would riff. And that meant I needed to make raspberry puree.
I started with half a bag of frozen raspberries, tossed them into a pot with about 20 grams of sugar, and heated and stirred until they started to break down and become liquid. Then I pureed them and strained out the seeds, first with a mesh strainer and then with multiple layers of cheese cloth. Neither was particularly efficacious. After significant effort (and mess), I had about 120 grams of puree. I set it in the fridge and called it a night.
The next day, I prepared the ganache. Based on the quantities outlined in the Notter book, I decided to half the recipe. I have to admit, I was a little bit nervous making this ganache. I've never added lemon juice to chocolate and I worried that it might break or seize. Presumably the addition of lemon juice was meant to enhance the flavour of the raspberry puree, so once the ganache was a beautiful emulsion, I took a deep breath and added the acid to the mixture. The gods favoured me and the ganache didn't split. And the resulting flavour was incredible.
Sadly, the gods didn't favour me for long. I'm not sure if the chocolate I was using as seed was itself out of temper or (more likely) if I was impatient and rushed the process, but my first attempt at shelling was a failure. I knew when I took the mold out of the fridge that the chocolate was not in temper. So I started over. I wasn't present the first time around, but I was hyper-focused the second time and it worked as expected.
As I write this, a week later, I am in the process of doing it all over again so that I will hopefully have 23 eggs in total to share with friends. The molds are shelled and filled, and tomorrow night before a museum board meeting, I hope to cap them.
Now, about that casualty. I did not discard it. Nay, I uncharacteristically ate it. (If you've been reading these blogs long enough, you know that I don't normally sample the finished product so soon after it's been made). What can I say about these eggs? They are incredible. The raspberry flavour is intense. The pairing with dark chocolate is ideal, ensuring the eggs aren't overly sweet. While I'm not a huge lover of raspberry, I would definitely make these again. I'm thrilled with how they turned out and can't wait to share them with family and friends.
This experiment definitely has me wanting to try additional chocolate and fruit puree pairings. I'm curious: What fruit and chocolate pairing would you use in an Easter egg?
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