Last month, when I did a mail-order experiment (password = “yum”), many people requested vegan Terffles. Recently I created a successful ganache using coconut cream instead of the dairy variety, so I decided to buy some expensive specialty ingredients to make a 100% vegan batch of Amaretto Amarena Cherries and C3 Spice, the most popular Terffle flavors.
Vegan dark chocolate is easy enough to find; Trader Joe’s 72% Dark suffices. White chocolate, with which I make the Amaretto ganache, is harder to find in vegan form, but not impossible. There are many vegan “white” “baking chips” but most are made with palm kernel oil, not cocoa butter. I ordered Pascha “Organic White Rice Chocolate Baking Chips” which do contain cocoa butter, but haven’t tried them yet. I also ordered a bag of straight-up cocoa butter, figuring I could adjust my ganache recipe and let the coconut cream, almonds, and sugar make up for the missing milk and sugar in the product itself.
Everything was going along fine…
…until I absent-mindedly mis-measured the coconut cream and Amaretto, accidentally doubling them. Whoops! Soon I was doing seat-of-the-pants cooking-by-taste (don’t worry, I never double-dip tasting spoons, I am after all a Certified Food Handler) while creating a mess:
The resulting ganache is now chilling in the fridge, and I hope to form it around Amarena cherries later tonight.
The C3 Spice ganache will be made with coconut cream and 72% Dark chocolate, but it needs something resembling milk chocolate for the coating. This was very hard to find. I eventually settled/splurged on a kilogram of Valrhona Amatika 46% Single Origin Almond Milk Chocolate, which arrived today:
It cost over 4 times the very good Aldi milk chocolate I usually use. Is it good? Yes. Have I had better? Also yes. But it’s better than cheap American Milk Chocolate, and really is quite good for what it is.
I actually think just a tiny bit of salt would improve the taste, so I will add some when I melt it for coating, along with freshly-ground cardamom.
Less awesome chocolatiers than myself would skip the pure cocoa butter and use palm kernel oil instead. They would also use dark chocolate even to coat a dark chocolate ganache, caring nothing about balance as long as it’s vegan. But I am not a less awesome chocolatier, I am my awesome self, and life is too short to eat mediocre chocolate. Even if it’s vegan.
Stay tuned.
Update March 20 2026: First batch of vegan terffles NOT AS GOOD as non-vegan ones. Taste too much like health food. I’m finding cocoa butter weird to work with. May have to re-do it from scratch.
