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These vegan white chocolate truffles are delicious, festive, and perfect for the holidays! Bonus: they’re made from scratch, and with little or no refined sugar, depending on if you make the dark chocolate shell.

There was a time in my life when I straight up hated white chocolate. I remember nodding heads with sympathizers who agreed that ‘it is NOT chocolate and it has no place in a dessert lineup’. To me, it just tasted like milk, sugar, and not much else.

Then a couple of things happened. I tried vegan white chocolate bars from Charm School Chocolate and was taken with the depth of flavor. Then I went to a vegan chocolate workshop by Pure Chocolate by Jinji and her white chocolate panna cotta had me captivated. And finally, I got on the computer and ordered myself some cocoa butter, and made vegan white chocolate everything for a couple of weeks straight. Including, but not limited to, these vegan white chocolate truffles… scones… banana bread… you name it. White chocolate flavored.

In the interest of not alienating the contingency of white chocolate haters among my readers, I’m trying to space out those recipes. So we’re just starting with the white chocolate truffles today. I’ve seen a recipe or two for vegan white chocolate truffles before, and they sounded great, but they called for ‘vegan white chocolate’ as an ingredient. Granted, Baltimore is no Portland, but I’ve never seen that in the store and it sounds like the kind of thing that could be really good or really bad depending on the brand that you buy. Start from scratch with cocoa butter, on the other hand, and you can control the sweetness, creaminess, and flavor to your own liking, without any soy milk powders needed.

The vegan white chocolate ganache that is the cornerstone of these truffles is adapted from the panna cotta that Jinji made, and it’s actually really simple! If you do much vegan cooking you probably have everything you need except for the cocoa butter itself. As for that, I love the cocoa butter that I bought from nuts.com. It is great quality and their shipping was super fast. They even threw in some bonus cacao nibs for free. There are also several options available on Amazon. Generally the best deal is to buy 16 oz. or more. That amount goes a long way and I don’t think the price tag is as crazy as it might seem.

One last thing: tempering the chocolate for the shell. If you don’t temper the chocolate then you will need to store these vegan white chocolate truffles in the fridge (or preferably the freezer). If you do, then they can survive at room temp. Tempering the chocolate involves holding the melted chocolate at a specific temperature and mixing in unmelted chocolate in order to realign the fat molecules. It’s how you get the very crisp texture that a store-bought bar of chocolate comes with. It’s kind of a pain in the butt, but you will be rewarded for your efforts. Totally optional, though! In the recipe I included a link to tempering instructions.