Post 100: Bill’s Fiery Vegan Chocolate Squares Experiment 2

 

The first step to making great candy is to set the creative mood by putting the right concert on the telly. Since what I am attempting is something innovated the only possible choice of bands is Slayer. They aren’t the heaviest band I know but they are the best selection in my small library of concerts. My choices were Slipknot, AC/DC, Candlemass, Jimmy Hendrix, Slayer, Coldplay, Incubus, Soft Cell, and Aerosmith. (I’m going to see Slayer again this August and I can’t wait).

I’m not going to reveal the recipe this time as I did with ginger candy experiment I conducted earlier this year. I really want nail down the specifics of the recipe for the possibility of filing a patent on it or resale purposes. I’ve always had dreams of grandeur, which is probably why I still like metal. Metal or (as I would like redefine it as) Post Rock music is generally larger than life. It’s not Post Rock if it doesn’t have a big sound. Maybe this what I’m trying to achieve with this candy is to create a larger than life flavor. And working within the constraints of vegan makes the problem that much more difficult to solve.

What I’m doing different this time is sandwich rum cherry jelly between two layers of vegan chocolate truffle. In order to do this I introduced a thickener to the (uncooked) jelly. The thickener is starting to set up nice. I mixed one box of pectin with 2 cups of pomegranate blueberry juice. In a few more minutes I will be able to mix it into the cherry booze jelly that I made yesterday from ½ pound of dried bing cherries and 1 full cup of a clear rum with a dash of coconut milk. This is the stage of the experiment I am most worried about. I hope that I didn’t make the thickener too thin.

Already, I can tell that the first part of my experiment is failure. Overnight the alcohol has evaporated out of the cherry booze-jelly even though I took precautions by sealing the container up in the refrigerator. Probably the only way to get a high alcohol content into the candy will be to inject it in with hypodermic needle after the candy has set up. Oh well, such in life.   

My apartment smells of cayenne pepper. This batch will have 3.5 teaspoons mixed into it. Most of the pepper went into the coca powder brown sugar coating that I will add on top of the candy. In the bottom of the pan I made a walnut powder crust and as you can see in the picture, I added some of the fiery powder into it.

The thickener should be ready now to blend into the cherry rum mixture. Hopefully, I won’t burn the motor up in the blender trying to mix this thick gooey blob into it. I guess I’d better help it along. Wow…this stuff is really thick. It’s collapsing into itself like a black hole.

It’s time now to begin cooking the foundation of the truffle. The building block is a creamy mixture of coconut milk, molasses, vegetable oil, and cayenne pepper. I’ll cook this stuff for five minutes at a low boil and then add two pounds of chocolate and two tablespoon of rum. The next step will be to lay a layer of this madness down onto the nut powder crust add some of the booze jelly and seal it up with another layer of heavy chocolate metal. The final step will be to coat the top with a thick layer of the coca brown sugar cayenne pepper powder. As it the candy sets overnight this mixture will form a delicious crust.

  

{See the next post for the pictures documenting the process}


Addendum: June 21, 2011,12:43 AM, the candy set up and it tastes better than my first try at the fiery vegan truffle on May 24. This recipe is even more decadent. I shouldn't have tasted it. I will most likely not get to sleep because of its out of this world richness.