Do not be alarmed: no rarefied work or chocolate tempering is called for here. You just melt and mix and mould.
I have to admit that the inspiration for this comes from a rather low-rent variant: some entirely industrially made, chocolate-flavoured, vermicelli-coated balls, which I came across in a beach bar in Ibiza once. I prefer them dusted with cocoa rather than rolled in chocolate-flavoured sugar bits, but I am not trying to fashion them into elegant morsels, hence the inclusion of Bailey’s.
Serve after dinner, with coffee, on hot summer evenings when a proper pudding feels like too much.
150g dark chocolate, minimum 70% cocoa solids
200ml double cream
4 tablespoons Bailey’s Irish Cream
5 tablespoons cocoa powder
Break up the chocolate into small pieces and melt it with 100ml of the double cream in a saucepan, very gently.
Pour into a bowl, add the Bailey’s and let the mixture cool. Then whisk the remaining 100ml double cream until soft peaks form, and fold it into the cooled chocolate mixture. Let it harden in the fridge for at least an hour or until you can shape it into balls.
Now do just that. It’s messy work but not hard: take small nuggets into your hands and roll them into little balls, then dust them with cocoa (by rolling them into some cocoa sieved out on to a plate) and sit them on a Swiss roll tin which you simply place in the deep freeze. It’s best not to make these in advance as their intense chocolatiness seems to fade after a couple of days in the freezer. And when you’re serving them, don’t take them out more than 10 minutes before you want to eat them: they need some of the raw chill taken off, but you don’t want them to soften into unfrozen gunge.
Makes approximately 30.