Dairy Free Truffles?

Every once in a while people ask me to host a cooking class or provide a recipe or even write a cookbook. I turn them all down, politely of course. I can follow a recipe. As a house husband I do most of the cooking. But give me a bunch of ingredients and tell me to come up with a meal and I'll give you a bunch of hot ingredients.

So I am always impressed at people who manage to rejigger recipes that would seem to absolutely unquestionably require milk products to make them work and transform them into something dairy free.


Case in point. To celebrate their National Chocolate Week, Liverpool Daily Post writer Emma Pinch wrote a feature article on Bala Croman's new chocolate business.

She manages to produce, by herself, 10,000 chocolates a month, including the ones I didn't think were possible.

Others range from curious to positively eye-watering, frequently with savory ingredients which she insists chocolate complements perfectly. "I add chocolate to chilli con carne and over roast chicken with balsamic vinegar," she says. "I'm always experimenting. We were asked to do dairy-free truffles, so we made them with water instead of cream.

"To give them creaminess, I added coconut milk. We’d had a Thai curry and I thought, lemon grass would go, and that's how we got Thai Temptations."

Coconut milk is often mentioned as a substitute for cream but it doesn't cook up in the same way so must be handled knowledgeably. I also need to add that I recommend only true coconut "milk" straight from the nut. Some Americanized varieties of coconut "milk" add actual cow's milk, rather ruining its non-dairyness.

Dairy-free truffles sound amazing. I hope my U.K. readers can indulge themselves before National Chocolate Week ends. Either that or get the celebration changed to National Chocolate Year, as is should be.