Day 18: Sweet cicely in plain chocolate

Sweet cicely, Myrrhis odorata



Early summer is the season for Sweet cicely - these lush, fullsome plants swell hedgerows and verges with their fast, ferny growth and as you brush past them, waves of aniseed scent waft into the air.  So love these plants and have spent almost all my wild flavoured chocolate-making years trying to find a way of capturing that aniseed flavour.  My favourite chocolates have deep undernotes of aniseed and so I know that Sweet cicely and chocolate is a match made in heaven - just need to work out how to get them together.

This chocolate is in the Advent Calendar in the ‘the flavour that took the longest to get right’ category.  The problem seems to be that the flavour is not very stable and seems sensitive to heat.  Traditionally this plant was used to sweeten fruits - like gooseberries and rhubarb; not so much sweeten but really reduce the amount of sugar needed.  I have tried infusing leaves, seed heads, flowers, the stems, the roots even - but that aniseed flavour eluded me. 

Each year I make syrups with the flowers and leaves, and made a Sweet cicely champagne (as you would an elderflower one) and these are delicious - lots of honey flavours and yes, a little bit of liquorice.  

The crystalised green seed pods hold the most flavour, and last year I played with grinding them into plain chocolate, which it worked pretty well, but when I used the salted Dominican Republic 68% from Bare Bones – it just worked fantastically.   That little bit of salt just works a treat.

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