Nuggetty Goodness

Pristine Fairy Habitat

This edible fairy garden (EAT ALL THE FAIRIES!) >.> uses exactly the same base as the Hazelnut pistachio strawberry osmanthus truffle bar things.

Except that this time round, for pretties and flavourings we haz:
- rose essence
- vanilla essence
- rose petals (from dried rosebuds for rose tea - some steamed to rehydrate them, some straight off the dry buds)
- freeze-dried peach slice, chopped
- silver sugar ball things (I think they're called 'dragees'. Or maybe 'fairies'. ~_o )
- cheap matcha (nothing you'd want to make koicha, or even usucha with - good enough to cook is good enough)

Am very pleased a nugget at how the blend of flavours turned out. If you like Turkish delight chocolates, this is just the thing, with the peaches adding interesting 'high' notes, and the pistachios adding nice texture. :X The matcha just adds fairy moss.

Blurry Chunks of Sundered Fairy Habitat

Alas, all my pics of the sliced squares turned out blurry. T_T That's what I get for taking pics after sundown!

(If you're in Melbourne, don't bother with T2 matcha. It's bad. You're better off going to any random asian grocery and buying a 50g tin of matcha for $5~. Just make sure it's from Japan, and not a mainland chinese imitation. You'll be getting the same amount of quality, or lack thereof, for a tenth of the T2 price.)

Being the soul of restraint, it's SO unusual for me to go completely mad, and throw in the kitchen sink. Of course it is. Ahem.

1) Hmm wanna make truffles but too lazy to roll balls. Okok let's make truffle bars.
2) Drat, no Nutella, was planning to use that. Ooh but look, hazelnut essence. Ok!
3) Pistachio looks so pretty in choccies, let's throw some in.
4) Hey I have those freeze dried strawberries, and pink is pretty with green. Chop some of those and put them on top!
5) Oo yellow is pretty with pink and I just happen to have dried osmanthus flowers...

And so we have these Hazelnut pistachio strawberry osmanthus truffle bar things.

They are amazing. I don't really like chocolate, I just love how it looks. But in the process of 'squaring' the bars, I've eaten more chocolate than I have in the past 6 months, lol!

Best of all, they're super easy to make (well the base is), and you can throw as many 'pretties' as you like in / on top.

Ingredients
200ml sweetened condensed milk (aka 2 parts)
200g good 70% cocoa dark chocolate (aka 2 parts) (broken into squares it comes in. I'm too lazy to do more than that.)
25g~ honey
25g~ butter (salted, unsalted, doesn't matter. I used salted cause lazy.)
some vanilla essence
some hazelnut essence
some freeze-dried strawberries (chopped)
some osmanthus flowers
some pistachios (whole)

Crafting
1) Dump chocolate, honey, butter in a bowl.
2) Shove bowl in microwave, melt until melted. Until the chocolate and stuff is melted. Not the bowl. If the bowl has melted, you've gone too far. Safest to stop when there are a few lumps of chocolate left, and finish it by stirring it all into a homogenous gloop.
3) Throw in essences, stir stir stir till incorporated.
4) Plop in condensed milk, stir stir stir till incorporated.
5) Mix in pistachios .
6) Pour into some kind of (parchment-paper-lined) pan, make pathetic attempt at forming some sort of 'slab'.
7) Decorate with freeze-dried strawberry pieces and osmanthus flowers in a suitably 'artisanal' fashion.
8) Tos...put gently in fridge (no need to cover unless your fridge has stinky things).
9) Ignore for at least 4 hours.
10) Remoof from fridge, cut into squares.
11) Eat all the leavings that are ~_o 'unfit for presentation'.

Notes
If you want to mess with the ratio of condensed milk to chocolate, more milk will give you softer trufflepieces, more chocolate will give you harder ones (duh right). This ratio gives you pretty much perfect 'fancy truffle' texture. Not too squishy, not too hard, just right.