Rum truffles ('The Food Chain')

The 'Food Chain'

No this is not a science lesson akin to dog-chicken-corn, this is a different sort of food chain.  The food chain that tends to define the contents of my shopping lists. I hate wasting food and always try to be a little bit frugal but this tends to lead me on a downhill spiral of recipe upon recipe (or shall we be optimistic and say uphill spiral?)

Let me give you an example - I had a craving to make rum truffles last week, the bakery type not the chocolaterie variety.  Rum truffle recipes were a way of a bakery using up broken biscuits and old sponge, so the chain began me having to make some little sponge cakes. Half of these were iced for a yummy afternoon treat and the rest were kept for the truffles. (The leftover rum went into a yummy Zombie cocktail). I bought in the biscuits rather than making them myself, but then I had half a packet of digestives.  So I decided to make a cheesecake.  This required me to buy lots of Quark (I was doing a German -style cheesecake), and yes there was then quark leftover so I used it to make a sort of moussey-fruity dessert, thus ending the chain.

Craving for rum truffles  sponge cakes  truffles  cheesecake (and cocktail!)  mousse dessert

I made the cheesecake so as to not waste the biscuits (yes I could have just dunked them in my tea but that wouldn't have been very creative now), those biscuits were probably only worth about 30p but I refused to waste them so ended up making more things, which of course meant spending more money.  Maybe that's the curse of the foodie, every recipe inspires another, but I guess my stubborn refusal to throw things out keeps my repoiture fresh!

Rum Truffles (makes about 12 cupcake case sized truffles)

6 tbsp Cocoa
1/4 pint hot water
7 tablespoons dark or golden rum*
4 tablespoons apricot jam (I actually used homemade peach jam but I don't expect you all to have that!)
350g biscuits (nothing too exotic, digestive are ideal) crushed
350g sponge cake, crumbled
chocolate vermicelli

Put the cocoa in a bowl and pour on the water and the rum and mix well until smooth. Add everything else apart from the vermicelli and mix it together well, knead until you have a firm sticky dough, if too dry toss in more rum (or water for the boring ones out there). Roll the mixture into small balls a to fit your cases snuggly and then roll them in the vermicelli until coated. Best kept in the fridge.
Simple but oh so good.

* You could soak some raisins in the rum if you like before you mix it all together, but in my humble opinion why ruin a nice piece of decadence with dried fruit?