We’ve been creating handmade vegan chocolate truffles at Booja-Booja for more than twenty years. We constantly review and tweak our processes and recipes, to make sure our chocolates are as delicious as possible: and as demand for our delicious vegan chocolates has grown we’ve found ways to make more and more truffles every day.
However, the essence of what we do and how we do it has remained the same.
Our vegan chocolates are still handmade, still made in Norfolk and still utterly exquisite. Here’s a glimpse into the amazing work of our talented team of chocolate truffle makers...
Firstly of course we take care to choose the very best ingredients. Everything we use is organic, vegan and free from dairy, gluten and soya.
The first stage of the truffle making process is mixing. We mix our ingredients together using an electric food mixer (a bit like your food processor at home, only quite a lot bigger). We only use a handful of natural ingredients in each truffle and you’ll find them listed on every box and pack. We cook or melt some of them before they’re added to the mix; but how much and in what order they’re mixed? That’s all part of the Booja magic!
Traditionally the creamy inside of a truffle is called a ‘ganache’ which is equal parts chocolate and cream. Our vegan chocolates are dairy-free so our truffle mix contains mostly chocolate and coconut oil, with a few other ingredients depending on the truffle flavour we’re making. Technically it’s not a ganache, but sometimes we still call it that.
Now comes the real art; turning a gooey, yummy mix into award-winning chocolate truffles.
The mix is poured on to a special table, where it’s smoothed out, by hand, to create a shiny slab of glistening gorgeousness. If you’ve ever tried to smooth the top of a cake or brownie mix in a tin you’ll know it’s not as easy as it looks, but our chocolate mixing maestros are skilled and super speedy at taming truffle mixes, whether they’re smooth like Around Midnight Espresso and Fine de Champagne or full of fruity, nutty or toffee pieces like Hazelnut Crunch or Almond Salted Caramel.
After some important chill out time (it’s hard work becoming a delicious vegan chocolate truffle you know!) the slabs are cut, using our special truffle cutter. This is where our truffles take on their distinctive cube shape and it’s another job we take care to do by hand.
Once the cubes are cut they need to be completely covered with melted chocolate and to do this we enlist the help of a machine; our very special, hard-working ‘enrober’. There’s something of a Willy Wonka feel to the enrobing process, as each individual cube is draped with satin-smooth melted dark chocolate, before being dropped into a tray of cocoa powder. This melted chocolate, once cooled, becomes the shell that gives each individual chocolate truffle its firm but gentle bite.
And so, our team transforms simple organic ingredients into Booja-Booja truffles... some of the world’s best vegan chocolates.
All that remains is to pack them, which we also do largely by hand, but that’s another story…