2014 Cooking Club Week 46: Oreo Truffles and Dishwasher Vodka

Given the time of year, I thought I'd post up a couple of recipes that would make nice home-made gifts. Best thing is, no baking!

Oreo Truffles: Makes about 30-40 truffles. You'll need a food processor, though I used my liquidiser that has similar blades and they came out perfect too. I also used Lidl subsitutes, as you can see, and I personally could not notice a taste difference from previous batches.

Ingredients:
3 packets Oreo Cookies.
2 packs of Philadelphia Cheese.
Cocoa Powder to dust.

To decorate: Petit Four cases and gold edible lustre dust.

Blitz the cookies in the food processor. Add in the cheese, mix well until the cheese is well blended. Chill in the fridge for an hour or so, as it makes the mixture easier to work with.

Roll into small balls. I usually do them about the size of a medium marble. Gently toss into the cocoa powder and place in the little case. Repeat until you run out of truffle mixture. I dusted this batch with the gold lustre dust from Decobake, and they look decadent and Christmassy. More so if you used foil cases.



Dishwasher Vodka - no photos, apologies for that!

This is a quick method of making flavoured vodka. Boiled sweets and chocolate work best - fruity, chewy sweets such as skittles/ blackjacks would require a bit of skimming of the scum that forms on the surface afterwards, but would be well worth the extra effort.

Ingredients:
1 litre vodka
Flavour of choice eg: 500g of Werthers toffee /cola cubes / after dinner mints/ (or any chocolate bars, I hear mars bars are also lovely )salted caramel etc. You can also use vanilla pods, or red chili - just prick them a few times with a fork or skewer before adding to the vodka

Remove about a quarter of the vodka from the bottle. Add the sweets, bashing them up a bit first, especially if they are big. Replace cap and tighten. Twist cling film securely around the neck and cap as a further precaution. Put the bottle in the top shelf of your dishwasher and put on a 70 degree cycle.

If you dont have a dishwasher, (or in my case, have a broken one - NOT vodka related I promise!) you can just put your ingredients into a kilner jar for a few weeks, giving it a shake every time you are passing.

Depending on the ingredients, you may need to strain off some solids, in which case, coffee filters are great for that.

Here is a Christmas Pudding Vodka recipe:

Ingredients:
1 litre vodka
4 tbsp dark brown sugar
1 cinnamon stick
2 cloves
Peel of 1 orange
Peel of 1 lemon
25g currants
25g raisins
25g dried figs, halved if large.

Method as per above - you may want to blitz the ingredients a bit so that they will fit into the bottle, and you'll need to strain it with a coffee filter afterwards. Stick a festive ribbon on the bottle, and it makes an unusual gift.