Sweet chestnut and cardamom truffles

Ingredients:

500g sweet chestnuts - steamed and peeled

1 t.s. ground cardamom

1/2 t.s. vanilla powder

200g mascobado sugar (or coconut sugar, or stevia or dried dates, pureed)

200g dark chocolate

Method:

Place the chestnuts in a food processor and grind them into a more or less fine powder (I leave tiny pieces that add a more chewy texture, but you can determine how fine you want your powder). 

Add the spices and the sugar to the chestnut powder. Stir it well until all ingredients are evenly distributed. 

Form balls with the mixture.

Place the chocolate in a double boiler - a.k.a. bain-marie - and melt it.

Cover the balls with the chocolate and place the balls on a tray covered with parchment paper. 

Place the balls in the fridge. 

This is what you get if you combine all ingredients together instead of covering the balls with the chocolate

If you want to make these balls look way better than what you see on the pictures above, it would be a good idea to let them chill for a few hours in the fridge before covering them with the melted chocolate. I just couldn’t wait. ;-) 

Store the balls in the fridge for up to 4 days. It could be that it keeps well for a longer period of time but I wouldn’t risk making too large of a batch, as freshly cooked chestnuts can easily ferment.

So what I actually did when trying out this recipe was to use only 2/3 of the sweetened and spiced chestnut powder to roll the balls and cover in chocolate. I added the other 1/3 of the chestnut mixture to the remaining chocolate that was left in the melting bowl. There is always a lot of chocolate left when we use it melted like that. By combining the rest of the mixture with the chocolate, I managed to use all the ingredients in a more efficient manner. So after bringing it all together, I put it in the fridge, allowed it to cool enough to the point that I could roll more balls with it. The resulting balls were also delicious. I also kept them in an air-tight container in the fridge.