Every holiday season I try to come up with one experimental truffle recipe for future development. Usually the experiment will be "good enough" that I let people try them. Sometimes it's actually great and ends up in the regular rotation with no additional tweaking. But every once in a while... it's a spectacular failure.
This year my experiment was a Matcha Truffle. Which I am now calling the "Miss Havisham Truffle," because, like the vengeful jilted spinster from "Great Expectations," this truffle is cloyingly sweet, with an overwhelmingly bitter bite. Purely two-dimensional, very unpleasant to experience, an unfulfilled hollow shell of a creature. In short, this truffle has a serious personality disorder. On top of which, it looks like it got dressed half a century ago.
Epilogue: No one is getting these. Back to the drawing board. I rather enjoy this kind of failure and (since I do actually like matcha) am already thinking about how I might turn it around. For one thing, I will use a better grade of matcha—one that I'm willing to drink. Maybe also add something to make the flavor profile more interesting, possibly citrus... like maybe an orange liqueur???.... is that a crazy idea? And while I will still use white chocolate for the ganache because I love the idea of a green center, dipping them in white chocolate (I used Valrhona Opalys) was a huge overly sweet mistake. I'm thinking a semisweet might be the best bet—what do you guys think? I have a block of Callebaut 811 and could use that.
EDITED TO ADD: Also I think I am done trying to work with hollow shells. No matter how fluid my ganache is, it's always a fiddly, super annoying PITA to make sure I've filled them completely... and even when I'm "pretty sure," like I was here, there are still always some with gaps. Actually, I just had an idea: I made 30 of these for my test batch, and since NO ONE is going to eat any of them, it seems like a great opportunity for some data collection. I'm going to cut all of them open and find out what percentage of them have gaps. Guessing it will be a high number.
