I started blogging 23 days ago. In those first days I found a cooking challenge for Whoopie. Sorry, Whoopie Pies.

I had started to work out a formula for a salmon roulade based biscuit with a creme fraiche herbed filling when someone mentioned on my blog that she’d love to eat a white chocolate Whoopie Pie. (Game on.)

The initial flavour pairing was pecan, coconut, white chocolate, but coconut in the biscuit morphed it into a macaroon — there is no ‘Whoopie’ in macaroon. Coconut milk in the batter lacked “Whoo”. And white chocolate is just vanilla flavoured cocoa butter. So let’s rethink it: How do you make white chocolate the flavour of chocolate?

Cocoa flavour in our foods comes from the cocoa bean in one of its forms from nibs to chocolate, darkening the end product; or a chemical flavouring; or occasionally a liquor. But what if the trick that put grape juice in my cognac could put chocolate in my milk?

• 100 grams Valrhona cocoa nibs in
• 500ml whole milk with
• 2 NO2 cartridges and a
• 12 hour wait produces

white chocolate milk from cacao nibs, whole milk, and whip cream dispenser.

Almost Pure White Chocolate Milk. The milk has a few minute particles of cocoa which fall out over time or can be filtered off with a fine mesh tamis. This new milk, either way, is chocolaty with none of the bitterness from cocoa and is almost pure white and so with the fine seeds from a vanilla bean the White Chocolate Whoopie Pie is on its way.

White chocolate biscuit for Whoopie Pies.

In the coming days I will upload the finished product with the kid-tested-recipes, but before that I’d like to share a few of things I learned along the way.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about Banoffee Whoopie Pies, caramelised bananas, banana toffee and the resulting banana tuile