Kinako Chocolate and Truffle

Kinako tuile and ice cream, warm chocolate mousse, butterscotch and summer truffles

I guess an apology is in order for not posting anything for almost 6 weeks! With a massive number of papers due and finals, it isn't a surprise that I got carried away. 

Learning from the kinako chocolates I made a while back (seriously, its been a while, but an idea worth checking out) it made a lot of sense to combine another deep, earthy ingredient into the equation- summer truffles. The slightly warm chocolate mousse has always been comforting to the heart; here the truffles season this warm, airy yet rich base to coat the mouth.

The kinako this time takes the form of an ice cream. This is in part a derivate of the chocolate mouse with potato skin ice cream that I found worked so well together, texturally and in terms of flavor, which led me to believe that it would sit well with a warm "mousse" in this case. I remember craving butterscotch when I was formulating this dessert- some sort of 'caramelized' milk has, in my opinion, always added more complexity to the dish when chocolate is included.

Perhaps the most common combination with chocolate in pastry shops this days has got to be feulletine- thin french crepe shards, delicious and crispy. In this particular case, my 'feulettine' piece was composed majorly of kinako powder, adding flavor along with texture.

The overall perception of the dish was perhaps that somewhat familiar flavors on somewhat familiar textures works really well. This particular set of textures seems like a great base for other combinations to experiment with, especially if they're sort of new and out there. I've found things slightly harder to accept if there isn't an easily recognizable component in the dish, regardless of how well it may work objectively.