Pages

Thursday 24 June 2010

violette

I've been disgraceful absent from these pages however, I've not been idle. Oh no, I've been stuffing my face with violet creams.


I made my fist batch of these for my Granny's 93rd Birthday last month. She is a big fan of the violet cream and when I saw the recipe in Life is Sweet I knew I had to try them. Miss Hope calls for violet syrup and suggests Confiserie Florian which looks lovely but the postage to the UK is trop cher mes amis.


So I went on the hunt for something else. There are several violet liqueurs out there (violet cocktails are tres chic the noo, apparently). I was a little concerned that a liqueur might not be as strongly flavoured as the confectioner's syrup and contacted Miss Hope for her reassuring expert advice before settleing for Lejay Lagoute's Parfait Amour.




The liqueur worked perfectly. I used the recipe for the rose creams (which ups the syrup or liqueur to icing sugar ratio) but  I did need to add a good bit more icing sugar to make the paste knead-able. Apart from that they were ridiculously easy to make. My first batch were ever so pretty and mostly given away but the second lot (for my Birthday) were made on a day too hot for sucessful chocolate en-robement. They were no beauties, but I managed them. I used the same Waitrose Continental dark chocolate as I did in this post and it's slightly bitter edge was a delicious compliment to the suggary, perfumed fondant.
Sweet amour.