Journey to the sweet side: White chocolate coconut bites

It happens sometimes that you are left with an ingredient from a different recipe, which may be quite specific. The other day I had some condensed milk lying around from making key lime pie. While condensed milk may be more common in American kitchens, we don't use it that much in European kitchens. Well at least I don't ... not to anger any Europeans who may be more familiar with it :)

I made raffaello balls before, but it was a long time back and I only remember that the main ingredient was powdered milk. Given that I don't normally stock powdered milk (hell I wouldn't even know where to look for it in a supermarket) I decided to try my own version of these sweet coconut bites.

I knew that if you mix powdered milk, confectioners sugar and water, you actually get a homemade version of condensed milk, so it shouldn't be that difficult to recreate something similar. In the spirit of experimentation I went through my kitchen and found some white chocolate, which helps everything stick together.

For 14 bites:

10 g butter

80 g condensed milk

80 g white chocolate

60 g grated coconut + a little extra for rolling the balls

Melt butter in a pan over the stove or in a microwave and ad to the condensed milk. Melt white chocolate in a microwave or in a double broiler.

Mix contents of both bowls together. The mixture will become very thick, actually it will seize, but this time it is ok (in any other case, seized chocolate will give me nightmares). Add coconut, mix well and let cool in a fridge for about 30 minutes.

Take the cooled mixture, form little balls and roll them around in leftover coconut. Work quickly, since the longer you handle the balls, the stickier the mixture will get. Store them in a fridge (if there is any leftover). Even though in the end they do not taste anything like raffello, mine were gone in an instant.