It happened! I found a flush of jelly ears close to home and I finally got to try making these strange little sweets.

As I mentioned in my previous post on Jelly Ears (Auricularia auricula-judae), part of the reason I love these fungi is their general weirdness. But I also love that you can make sweets out of them! It’s weird and wonderful to make sweets from little wobbly mushrooms.

And so since the day I heard you can make “jaffa cakes” out of wood ears I have always wanted to. But whenever I found a bountiful flush of wiggly little ears sticking out of a log I was away from home, without access to a kitchen or a decent way of drying them out.

Until last week, when I went on a mission to find them. A huuuge flush including some very strange old ears that I think had been stretched out of continually freezing and thawing.

I used a range of different recipes to find what I wanted to make for these fungi, and the recipe below is what I did in the end.

I haven’t put amounts in the ingredients because honestly I was making this up as I went along but I will eventually test again for ingredient amounts.

Recipe

Ingredients:

Jelly Ears
Orange juice (could use a different juice if you wanted!)
A few biscuits (I used hobnobs, but the choice is yours)
Bar of chocolate to melt

Note that this process is done over a number of hours, longer if you have to dry the fungi out first.

Dry out your fungi
I just left mine on a windowsill on a napkin for a few days and they shrivelled up nicely. If they’re already dried, skip this step.
Soak in orange juice
Pour some orange juice in a bowl, add your fungi until they’re looking back to their fleshy selves!
Put in the fridge
Leave them for maybe 30 minutes in the fridge just to they’re a bit more solid for the next stage.
Melt your chocolate and smash up some biscuits
Dip rehydrated fungi into chocolate
Dip your chocolate coated fungi into your biscuits
you’ll want to make sure the chocolate hasn’t completely set, but if you dip all your fungi in chocolate and then into the biscuits, it should work fine!
Refrigerate again
Just to set the chocolate and have them ready to eat or take out and share with pals.
Enjoy!

How these tasted

Good! Honestly I was impressed. It was chocolatey and biscuity and the texture in the middle was a great texture for this, gave jaffa vibes for sure but a bit more solid.

I couldn’t massively taste the orange I think because I used quite strong dark cooking chocolate for the outside so I’ll use a subtler chocolte next time.

I took them to a queer bog event a couple of days after I made them and the feedback was good! People thought they were odd, but very cool, which honestly? Hard agree. Will be making again.

Making them without foraging?

If you wanted to make similar things but don’t feel confident foraging/can’t find jelly ears around you then you could also try your local east asian supermarket and look for some wood ear fungi (same family, different fungi). They’re often sold dried simply labelled as “black fungus”. I think I might try these again with those if I want to share them around with people.

Is that really a jaffa cake?

I mean only kind of, the jelly ear in the middle soaked in orange juice makes the weird jelly filling. With the chocolate and the biscuit i’d say it’s jaffa cake adjacent. But I guess to make this more “authentically” jaffacake like you’d want to use cake rather than biscuit to coat. it was just a lot easier to use ready made biscuits.

If you make these I’d love to know what you think. Happy foraging/cooking!