The Puns Are Condiment(ary): The Show Must(ard) Go On By Celine Dijon

That’s right folks, you get double the puns for the price of one! I mean, can you really have too much pun(s)? Of course not – that was clearly a rhetorical question 😉 .

I will have you know however, that that double punning wasn’t done just for the joy of it, but because I’m actually bringing you TWO (yes you read that right) mustard based desserts this week. This wasn’t supposed to happen of course, but as per usual with me, I couldn’t decide which of my two choices sounded more interesting/ better/ weirder and so I opted to do both.

I’d actually completely made my own decision on this front – mustard lime white chocolate truffles (because white chocolate is so sweet, I figured it would be a nice offset of flavours. Also, by using white chocolate, the truffles will actually look….uh…mustardy I guess? The lime was thrown in there because a) I think it goes with mustard, but also b) if after I mix the ingredients together, I find the mustard too overpowering, I’ll just add more lime and hopefully cover it up and still save the truffles. “Ummm…Amber, what’s that weird background flavour I’m tasting?” “JUST SHUT UP AND EAT YOUR LIME (sotto vocce “mustard”) TRUFFLES!!! WHY MUSTARD YOU ALWAYS QUESTION ME????!!!” 😉 ).

Here’s the real skinny on these truffles/ candies though – that main photo is really a bit of tease. I freely admit here that the photos for these truffles look great because they gave me an opportunity to use some of my newly acquired candy moulds. However (and I’m absolutely certain this will be a huge shock to all of you), the flavour of these truffles was….not great. I tried so hard to save them by continuously adding random things (more lime? maple syrup? Freeze dried pomegranates? Icing sugar? More white chocolate?…. you get the idea) that I thought would improve them, but all I really ended up with was more “unsaveable” overly mustardy truffles. That was the mistake really, I think these might have worked out, but I got a little overzealous on the mustard front (also, stupidly one of the “additions” I tried adding more of to save these was mustard *forehead slap*. “Hey Amber, these “truffles” taste a little bit too spicy/ savoury/ mustardy. What do you say, we add more mustard? That should fix this.” Apparently I also think you can cure high blood pressure by downing straight up tablespoons full of salt and diabetes will go into complete remission if you increase your sugar intake and reduce your exercise. Have I mentioned that I rent myself out as a health coach? 😉 ) and there was just no coming back from that 🙁 (see, now you know that I don’t always tell you that everything I make is great. There are many, many disasters. Live and learn I suppose). Because I have no desire for you to suffer as well, I opted to not share this terrible recipe with you, so, you know, you’re welcome.

Luckily though, prior to this disaster I had done my usual dumb thing and decided to see what the world at large had previously attempted in the mustard-dessert combinational realm. I figured I wouldn’t find much, and technically I didn’t, except for about a billion recipes for mustard ice cream. Yes, you read that right. Now this I gotta try, I said to myself. However, I don’t own an ice cream machine and most definitely have no desire to make it so frequently that I want to bother investing in a complete space hog of a device that I will almost never use.

One of my favourite commercially available ice creams is made with a cashew base, and I just happened to have some homemade cashew butter in my fridge, so I started looking into seeing if I could somehow incorporate that and not use an ice cream machine. This was way more successful than the truffles, so I am sharing the recipe. However, small caveat, go light on the mustard and increase slowly as it’s easy to overdo it. Also, because mustard made me think of hot dogs and baseball games, I wanted to add a crunchy element to this as well. In an ideal world, I think pretzels would’ve been the perfect addition. But, when you decide at the last second to do something like this, you use what you have on hand, so I tossed in some equally baseball season friendly peanuts, which were still good, but I think pretzels would’ve been even better.

Now to also be completely honest with you on the mustard ice cream front, I liked it, but Kevin not so much, so it’s clearly an acquired taste thing to a certain extent. It did get me thinking though that I don’t understand why we’re all so stuck on ice cream being a dessert thing. I think restaurants should totally get on this band wagon and perhaps offer some appetizers that are like savoury ice cream. Maybe like a bruschetta ice cream sandwich? I.e. Tomato ice cream sandwiched between some super herby crackers. That actually sounds weirdly good to me, and I would totally order it. Just remember, if this comes to pass in restaurants of the future, you heard it here first folks!

If you can mustard up the courage, I highly recommend giving this one a go.