I posted a version of this to a list on I’m on the other day and figured I’d share.

This is a recipe for truffles if you are using the sneaky-tricks-via-food to work on somebody for love/lust situations.  Everybody loves chocolate.  If they don’t like chocolate, you need to find somebody else to work on, ’cause that’s just a bad sign, man.  Seriously, though, this will often work when the old coffee or marinara sauce or mulled wine tricks won’t work, ’cause really – everybody likes chocolate.

You start with your basic truffle recipe. There are a million online if you don’t have one, but here’s a good basic one at kitchn, and here’s one at Simply Recipes. (Don’t worry.  It’s *really easy* to make truffles.)

Whatever recipe you’re using, be sure to heat your cream in its own saucepan.  When it’s just about to boil, remove from heat and add pinches of some or all of the following:

• damiana
• ginger
• cubeb berries (these are spicy, kinda like the love child of allspice and black pepper, so be aware)
• sampson snake root aka echinacea (it’s a little, er, zingy, so go light)
• cardamom
• cinnamon
• rose petals (unsprayed/organic)
• orange zest
• hibiscus flowers
• split vanilla bean

How much you need will depend on what you’re using and your batch size, but if you wanted these to taste like orange and ginger, for instance, and you were using 8 ounces of chocolate and 1/2 cup of cream, you’d use about 1/2 TBSP of ginger and about 2 teaspoons of orange zest, and add just a pinch of anything else since it’s going in there for magical and not flavor purposes.

Let herbs sit for about half an hour.  Then scoop the herbs out, reheat the cream almost to a boil, add your bodily stuff (skin scrapings or whatever), stir, and pour the cream over the broken up chocolate. Proceed with truffle recipe. You cannot screw this up.

Pray or speak your petition, aloud or mentally, as you’re adding your herbs and stirring in your personal concerns. Call your target’s name and be fervent. Remember hoodoo goes where you send it. You don’t want to be putting the mojo on the wrong person if somebody busts into your truffle stash, so tell it where you want it to go as you’re working. If you can and want to, you can get all fancy with some candle work while you work, but you don’t have to – the process of cooking a dish, especially for a specific purpose and with full conscious awareness, is legit a magical rite all on its own.

In terms of taste, you have options. You want spicy, go for more cinnamon, ginger, and/or cubeb. Or use candied ginger, dice it very finely, and add it after you scoop everything else out.

You want it to taste like roses, put a handful of rose petals in there. Or put a tablespoon of sugar and a couple of handfuls of rose petals into your food processor, grind them to pretty pink dust, and use that to coat your finished truffles.

Your target a coffee fan? Add a tablespoon of instant coffee or espresso and a scant handful of cracked cardamom pods. Get creative with liquers and coatings along the same lines. Two tablespoons of Grand Marnier can take the place of your orange zest – just stir it in when combining your chocolate and cream. You can vary the herbs depending on your goals — just make sure you’re using edible herbs. The good news is that there are tons of edible herbs out there that are useful in love work.  And since everybody loves chocolate, you can do some real damage with this recipe.

And with a little imagination, you can modify it, or similar candy or cookoie recipes, for other situations – anywhere where you can get people to eat your food, you can do a sneaky trick.  Got work problems and dreading that office potluck? Bring dessert.

(I used to work with a guy who had it in for office potlucks.  He would always make the hottest hotwings on the face of the earth – hotwings that would melt your face off, hotwings you had to handle with tongs.  He made a batch at my house once, and my eyes watered when I went into the kitchen. He would talk the wings up for a few days so all the billy-badasses would feel honor-bound to try them.  It was funny as all hell to watch people try to eat those things.  They were nuclear.  But this sort of thing gives you the idea, I hope).