Sigh — sometimes cooking experiments just fail, and it’s very sad. I HATE throwing food out, and usually I can salvage it *somehow*, but this just didn’t work.
I was aiming for a mango cream ganache — mangoes and cream and chocolate, as a filling for molded chocolates. But the mangoes & cream combined with the ruby chocolate (which I used for its fruity notes) to create an unappetizing brown, and even adding food coloring didn’t get it to a mango-ish color I was happy with. That wasn’t the real problem, though.
It didn’t *taste* like mango. I’d used frozen mango chunks, because y’know, this is the Midwest and it’s winter. Fresh, ripe mango is not easy to find here right now. And the result was just watery and lacking mango flavor and honestly, sad. I added some lemon zest, which helped perk it up a bit, but that made it even less mango-ish.
If I’d kept going, I would have produced the saddest mango creams ever. I’d have to name the recipe Mango Creams of the Miserable Homesick Diaspora.
I sighed, and poured it all down the sink.
I’m going to take another approach entirely — the delectable rose creams were made with a sugar paste of egg whites and powdered sugar and rose essence, so I’m going to try that, but with plenty of nice dried mango chopped up and stirred into the sugar paste.
That should be reliably tasty, fingers crossed, and as a bonus, will be more shelf stable than the cream-based version. (Though my chocolates should generally be eaten within 2-3 weeks regardless.)
Will report back on how the next batch goes — I have to swing by Pete’s first, get some spices for curry powder roasting, and look for their best dried mango.
I’ll try the ganache again at some point, but when I do, I’m going to use canned mango pulp — that works well for puddings and such, so I suspect it’ll be a better option. I may try blending with cream cheese instead of attempting the heated heavy cream + melted chocolate filling; that seems less liable to go wrong.
Probably too disheartened to risk it right now, though, esp. since I promised to get these chocolates out the door in time for Valentine’s Day.