CHOCOLATE CREATIONS

MELISSA HEMSLEY, FOOD WRITER

The deep chocolatey smell emanating from Melissa Hemsley’s kitchen is intoxicating. “I’m not a big pudding fan, but I love dark chocolate,” she says, standing at the stove, stirring her Happiness Balls mixture, which she’s making up to give to friends over Christmas.

“I spend an afternoon making hundreds of balls, customising them according to what people like. When you make something for someone, you’re creating a lovely connection with them.”

When she was a child, her parents would encourage Hemsley and her older sister, Jasmine, also a food writer, to be frugal around Christmas. “We were never allowed to write lists, unlike some of our friends,” she says. “My mum has six siblings with kids in the Philippines. She would say ‘you’re not getting a present this year, it’s going to one of them’. Which obviously I hated as a child, but now I see the value in it.

“Now I hate getting presents, and I hate shopping for them. I don’t want to consume and create more stuff. The only thing I like spending money on is food.”

Her chocolate truffles can be truly customised. “You can put orange extract for some and it tastes like Terry’s Chocolate Orange, or rum in others. I make a massive base batch and tailor each serving,” she says. Once the mixture has set in the fridge, Hemsley shows me how to scoop it out of the dish with a teaspoon, roll into a ball, then roll in a pile of toppings. Then they are ready to pop in a glass jar. “I recycle old glass jars,” she says. “They don’t even need a ribbon because the balls look so pretty.”

They look like a lot of time has been poured into them, but they are actually astonishingly easy. “You can make them in 10 minutes if you’ve got some mixture in the fridge,” Hemsley adds.