These fantastic sugar crunches add a tasty, colourful, crunchy decoration to the top of your chocolates.

What Is Sugar Crunch? 

Small sugar crystals, flavoured and coated, made to stay crisp on top of a finished product. The blackberry version is built on sugar with real blackberry powder and elderberry juice concentrate, so the deep purple comes from fruit rather than a synthetic colour, and the flavour is tart rather than sweet. A thin layer of cocoa butter around each crystal is what keeps it crunchy once it meets chocolate or cream.

How to Use Blackberry Sugar Crunch

Scatter it on at the end. On dipped or moulded chocolates, drop it onto the surface while the couverture is still crystallising and it will set in place on its own. On a cake or a tart, add it at service rather than in advance. It also folds into a buttercream or a ganache for texture, though the colour will bleed a little into anything pale, which is worth testing before a big run. Around 10 to 20g on a standard cake top is enough; it is a finish, not a filling.

Troubleshooting 

Water is what softens it. The cocoa butter coating slows that down but does not stop it, so on a wet surface - a fresh fruit glaze, an uncovered puree, a cream with free water in it - the crunch will fade
over a few hours. Keep the tub closed and somewhere dry and odour-free, since sugar picks up smells from a store room. Shelf life is 12 months. If the crystals have clumped, break them apart gently
rather than crushing them, or you will lose the texture you bought them for.

Pairings and Ideas

Blackberry is tart and dark, so it works against cream, white chocolate and almond rather than against another fruit. A few ideas to try:

• Scattered over a white chocolate bonbon so the colour reads against the shell
• On a lemon or vanilla cheesecake at service
• Through a buttercream for a textured cake filling
• Over a dark chocolate tart with a little crystallised violet
• On a plated dessert with a blackberry coulis
• Set into the top of a moulded chocolate bar