Raspberry Cups

I came up with this concoction while I was trying to find a way to make flavored truffles. I tried making mint truffles and ended up making chocolate Altoids. Ack! I tried strawberry, but chocolate is a very strong flavor and tends to drown out all the most potent ones (like mint!).

So I found a recipe for raspberry truffles using “white chocolate”. White chocolate isn’t really chocolate at all, no matter what they say in Europe. Basically, its vanilla flavored cocoa butter with sugar, no cocoa solids at all. Some folks really like it, but I’ve never cared for it myself.

So here’s the recipe and creation I came up with. Someone I knew referred to them as Raspberry Cups. If you click on the pics, they do get a little larger to see better.

This follows almost the same procedure as my basic truffle recipe. This time, take 1/2 cup of heavy whipping cream and 4 oz of black raspberry preserves and heat it in a small sauce pan.

I used Kroger brand Just Fruit (I think it was Kroger) preserves, but anything that is made with just fruit and not high fructose corn syrup will be good.

You’ll need an 11 oz bag of white chocolate chips. When you buy these, check the ingredients. If the first thing listed is not cocoa butter, put it back because its junk. I usually buy Ghirardelli brand chips but their white chips are made with partially hydrolized fat. Blech. Find a good one and use that. Put your chips in a large mixing bowl.

When the raspberries and cream begin to boil, pour them over the chips. You’ll want to mix them around a little bit to get them all warm enough to melt. If needed, you can put the mixing bowl of chips in the oven on “warm” to get them soft ahead of time. Its hard to blend them later if there are unmelted bits mixed in.

When you have let the mixture sit long enough for the chips to get mushy, add 2 tsp of Chambord black raspberry liquor, and start blending the mixture with a blender. The whole mixture is going to be faily runny and a dark purple color at this point.

Once its all smoothed out, fill another larger bowl about halfway with water and add some ice to it. Then place the mixing bowl in it and continue blending. You are trying to cool down the mixture now to get it firm enough to dispense, but not so firm that it will harden like the chocolate truffles. The consistency should be like whipped cream but a little denser.

Pretty soon, you will start to see the color of the mixture change from the dark purple to a lighter color as it thickens and air bubbles begin to be incorporated into it. You can see a bit of the dark stuff in this pic that hasn’t blended in all the way. Once its all light colored, it will probably be thick enough to stop.

Now you need something to pipe it with. You can use a pastry bag or I use a Pamper Chef dispenser thing that I can’t for the life of me remember what its called but it looks like this. Note the funky shaped tip.

At this point you want to take a spatula and fill whatever dispenser you are using. If you are using the Pampered Chef thing, it fills from the front end by taking off the tip.

Now you have a fancy raspberry white chocolate ganache (very light, not rollable) to use for all kinds of fun stuff. Here’s what I did with mine. I molded these chocolate cups from tempered couverture using an acetate mold. You can buy them in candy sections of department stores or at bake shops. This mold made the shape of the Reese’s cups. They are hollow inside because you pour the melted couverture into them and then after a minute, pour the excess back out. Its a little tricky and involves a small degree of cursing. I’ll probably talk about molding like this on another Chocolate Friday.

I took the dispenser and squirted the ganache out into the cups and made a little “tree” shape to them.

And then added some shaved chocolate sprinkles to some of them.

The ganache is firm enough that it will not flow, but it is mushy if you touch it to things, so this little desert doesn’t make for a good traveling item unless you are hand carrying it to someone.

Hope you enjoyed this! :)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 18th, 2005 at 7:10 am and is filed under Chocolate Friday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.