Not-Quite-Healthy I Love You Truffles

Health vs. happiness is the eternal sugar conundrum.

Valentine’s day has come and gone, but I’m still craving a little TLC. In our house here in Los Angeles, we’ve been savoring the slow season with rainy-day forts and reading, finding sweetness where we can. We’re coming together with the people we love to share what we find and savor a moment of respite together.

It’s been a tough time for our country and for many of us personally. When the walls seem to be closing in, I find that making space for sweetness can be a surprisingly reassuring gesture, especially when we share that sweetness with the people who form our community.

Friends and neighbors, loved ones and friendly strangers, we could all use a little something extra to help us navigate these dark days. Easy vegan truffles have been a small part of how we’re keeping hope and the spirit of pleasure alive in our little corner of the world. It’s my wish that they help you do the same.

The Spirit of Stone Soup

I made these truffles last weekend, when we had our annual flower arranging party, a way to mark the seasons that always leaves me thinking about the power of collaboration.

The way it works is this: everyone invited brings a flower or two to share. Some guests gather branches in their yards, others hit up the grocery store for carnations and wax flowers, other brave souls go to the early-morning flower market in downtown L.A. and pick up exotic blooms. We all get together and arrange. My friend Julia called it “stone soup but for flowers,” a kind of making-something-big-out-of-something-small magic that always makes us smile.

The joy of this event is the chaos. With a ton of small children running around, I wanted to make sure that everything on the table was as taste-safe as possible so no one would have to use their bouquet-making time policing sugar consumption. So, instead of traditional truffles, as delicious as they might be, I dreamed up this alternate recipe. Raw, vegan, and sugar free — healthy enough to do any almond-mom proud. I’m happy to say they were a hit and have quickly become a staple in our house.

Making Room for Self-Care in Chaotic Times

Everyone at our party had something to worry about. At least their children’s sweet consumption wouldn’t be on the list! One dear friend, who works as a nanny in my neighborhood, had seen a fellow nanny picked up by immigration enforcement. Another mom friend talked to me about potentially needing to move back to her home country — America no longer felt like a safe place to raise her children, and she has a sick mother back home.

Things are changing quickly. Facts of the world that once seemed stable are now in flux. And when we’re in a chaotic time, it’s good to be surrounded by people who get it and share a little something sweet.

As we assembled our bouquets and opened our hearts, I noticed the atmosphere in the room beginning to lighten. Children grabbed truffles, molasses-sweetened zucchini muffins, carrot sticks dipped in pink-hued white-bean hummus. People traded blossoms, laughed. One friend put Ethiopian jazz on the stereo, another got down on the floor with the toddlers and gave someone’s stuffed cow a ride in the dump truck. Gradually, the buckets of flowers on the table grew sparser. Bouquets grew. One at a time, our friends went back home, taking their flowers and a little piece of sweetness with them.

Health vs. Happiness: The Eternal Sugar Conundrum

I’d like to take a moment to address the elephant in the room: What to do about sugar with all those children around. I grew up in a household where we had one sweet thing every day, storing our Halloween bag in the fridge and eating one fun-sized candy bar every afternoon until sometime in the spring. When we baked cookies with my mother, we licked the spoon clean. At other people’s houses, birthday parties, or holiday celebrations, the rules were off, and we were trusted to self-regulate.

It felt like a good approach as far as I remember, although I’m sure at the time I was jealous of classmates who brought fruit gushers in their lunchboxes. These days, I don’t have much of a sweet tooth at all, but now that I’m the parent, I’m trying to strike that same delicate balance with my almost-3-year-old. I don’t want to demonize sugar, but I also don’t want it to be a constant presence. The recommended daily serving of less than six tablespoons seems already unreasonably high, but is that my inner almond mom speaking?

(For those less chronically online, an almond mom is someone whose obsession with “clean” eating makes her obsessively controlling of every morsel that passes her children’s lips. No red dye here, and certainly no refined sugars! Date chocolates would be right up this kind of gal’s street, but I’m hoping that by making them merely one part of our sweetness strategy, I can avoid that particular diet culture trap. Being healthy is still a good thing, and, at least for now, anchovies remain my toddler’s favorite treat. But I’d take a “truffle” any day!)

Emily Beyda’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Built, Refinery29, Smartmouth, Fodors, the Thrillist, the Austin Chronicle, and more. Her novel, “The Body Double,” was published in 2021.

---