— Cecilia Litvak

If I'm making truffles and I'm going to be serving them shortly, I don't put them in the freezer. But if I have made them ahead, which I often do because it's such an easy thing to just pull out of the freezer and have a nice plate for somebody, then I do freeze them, again, airtight, and I don't have any problem with flavor and the structure of the truffle being maintained. Now, I should say to you that you all ought to, in the same way that I talked about making sure that your oven is calibrated and learning your oven, make sure, obviously, that your freezer door is closed and that it's cold enough. You can get a freezer thermometer. My freezer is kept at zero. So, I haven't had any trouble with the flavor, but you want to make sure that you've got a flavorful truffle. Now, speaking of flavor, when you're making an ice cream that is going to be frozen, you need to add more flavor, more spice, more sweetener than you think is necessary because you're serving it cold, and that chilling will diminish the flavor. I've got some delicious, this is going to be my treat tonight, mocha ice cream in my freezer, and I'm going to make an affogato, which is a scoop of ice cream with a shot of espresso over it. Now, I wouldn't dare have espresso at 5:00 or 6:00 at night. I have my coffee in the morning, and that's it nowadays, because otherwise it interferes with my sleep. But what I did was I took our magic vanilla pastry cream from the course, and it's based on a recipe in my cookbook, "Vegan Chocolate," and I added a shot of very strong decaf espresso and tasted it, and that tasted good. And then I added some dark cocoa powder, and cocoa powder is unsweetened, and I whisked that in, or immersion blended it in, and put it in the freezer and used my Ninja CREAMi and had the most delicious mocha ice cream. I really liked it. So that cream is very, very versatile.