When I first saw these Valrhona fruit feves, I thought they looked really cool, and I also thought that they were probably not really that good. They are white chocolate with freeze dried fruit powder. I imagined that they couldn’t really have made them very fruity, after all they are in a base of white chocolate so they are probably very sweet with a pretty mild fruit flavour. More like white chocolate than like fruit.
When I actually tried them, I thought they were pretty impressive. They have really strong and distinct fruit flavours; they are tart and somehow almost juicy. They are sweet but not cloyingly sweet. They really exceeded my expectations. The line is called Inspirations and it comes in strawberry, raspberry, passion fruit, yuzu and almond. An excellent little food store in Victoria (the Market Garden - if you are in the area, go. It’s really excellent, and also really beautiful.) had little teeny jars of them so I thought I would try a couple flavours. I was so impressed that I went back and bought little teen jars of the other flavours. I thought I would do a series of recipes with each of the flavours here, starting with strawberry in these PB & J cookies.
I made a chewy, slightly salty peanut butter cookie, stuffed with jammy, juicy strawberry feves. The feves are bright, a teeny bit tart and very jammy. I think it’s important to keep them soft and chewy, so make sure to check on them early and pull them out of the oven at the first sign of browning at the edges.
Check out the rest of the fruit feve series:
almond - quadruple almond and apricot cookies
raspberry - raspberry almond freeform florentines
passion fruit - passion coco cream puffs
yuzu - yuzu pistachio shortbread
Note: this series is not sponsored by Valrhona. Unless you guys want to? I’m very open to that.
PB & J cookies
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup peanut butter (I used crunchy, salted ‘natural’ style peanut butter - use whatever peanut butter you would normally buy)
1 large egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 ½ cups strawberry feves (divided - reserve about ½ cup for the tops of the cookies if you like)
Line a half sheet pan with parchment paper and heat the oven to 350°F. In the bowl of a stand mixer, cream butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, scraping the bowl to ensure everything is evenly combined. Add egg, vanilla and peanut butter and beat on low speed until combined. Scrape the bowl.
Add flour, baking soda and salt and mix until just combined and no flour streaks remain. Mix in about 1 cup of strawberry feves.
Scoop dough with a medium sized cookie scoop (about 2 tbs) onto prepared baking sheet. Bake 9-11 minutes, or until the very first signs of browning around the edges appear. Cool cookies on a wire rack.
