What's your flava? Tell me what's your flava? Remember this annoying song from sometime last decade? Craig David sung to us about high maintenance ice cream and nausea-inducing walnut whip but he didn't sing about my personal answer to his sophisticated question - chocolate ganache is my flava (ok, I'm going with 'flavour' now, I can't handle intentionally incorrect spelling!). If there is a food of the gods, ganache is it.
What is it you'd like to have for dessert? Truffles? A velvety dream sauce for your ice cream? A sturdy base for your fondant to overlay? The answer to all of the above is ganache. This ridiculously versatile liquid gold can be flavoured and set to a consistency of your liking. I was going to go into the history of ganache and where it came from but in doing a bit of research, it seems that the Swiss and the French have never settled who came up with it first (kind of like Australia and NZ with the pavlova) so we're just going to leave that alone! Either one makes it a little fancy :)
Are you ready to have your mind blown with some class-A knowledge? Ganache tastes amazing when made with the best quality ingredients available. I know, I'll give you a minute to recover...
I personally love the taste of Cadbury chocolate so I use Cadbury chocolate melts or just plain Cadbury blocks. Basic chocolate ganache is made with a 2:1 ratio of dark chocolate to full fat cream. As the chocolate gets lighter (more fat content) you'll need to bump this up, I use 3:1 white-choc:cream for white chocolate ganache. If you don't mind cheating a little, flavoured chocolate is an easy way to achieve flavoured ganache - Nestle Club Peppermint, Nestle Club Espresso Crisp, Lindt Dark Orange, etc.
Here's the incredibly simple lowdown on how to make your ganache.
Leave the chocolate sitting in a heatproof bowl while you heat the cream.
Slowly bring the cream to a simmer in a saucepan over low-medium heat. This is where you add flavouring if that's what you want (coffee, liqueur, frozen fruit, chai....the possibilities are endless).
Once simmering, leave for a minute or so and then pour over chocolate in the bowl.
Ensure all of the chocolate is covered, and leave for the chocolate to melt - usually around 3-4 minutes.
Beginning with a spatula in the centre of the mixture, stir the cream and melted chocolate. The remainder of solid chocolate should melt with the stirring - if it doesn't melt by the time your ganache is glossy and thick, throw it in the microwave for about 5 seconds and keep stirring.
If you're after a velvety delicious topping for pudding or ice cream, or finishing a cake with poured ganache (such as in the picture at the top of this blog), use it straight away. As my ganache is used for covering cakes 99% of the time, I need it to be a thicker consistency than it will be when freshly made. All it needs to thicken is time - place some plastic wrap over the surface so it doesn't form a skin and leave it at room temperature.
After around an hour it should be cooled and thickened to spreading consistency, perfect for covering cakes. The consistency in the picture below was achieved by leaving the ganache for an hour or so. Leave it longer for truffles or to use it for carving.
Troubleshooting - you could run into a few issues, here are some that I've come across and the quick fixes to get your ganache back on track.
Separating: often when making white chocolate ganache something goes awry and the emulsion doesn't take effect. You are left with a lump of white congealed mush under a layer of yellow fat. Unsalvageable yes? NO! Refrigerate the mess for a good 15-20 minutes and then try stirring again. Given enough refrigeration, the ganache will come back together and you can pretend that little hiccup never happened! (I promise I won't tell.)
Too solid: sometimes I have forgotten about my ganache while busy with other things and when I return it's too solid for spreading. This can be fixed by re-melting it in the microwave, but take it easy - no more than 7 seconds at a time - it melts crazy quickly! Stir it so that it melts evenly, continue until your desired consistency is achieved!
Have a go at making some ganache, it's such an easy thing to make, considering how amazing it looks and tastes! It's easy to impress with ;)
Happy ganaching!
Nadia x
(PS - do you love my purple spatula as much as I do?! I was going to include a link to where you could pick one up for yourself, but can't actually find it. It was from Bed Bath N Table, maybe they'll make a comeback soon!)
