Winter Alchemy Drinking Blend – White Truffle, Dandelion Root, and Cocoa
A deep, grounding winter drinking powder shaped from roasted dandelion root, cacao, carob, hemp, and white truffle – bitter-sweet, earthy, and quietly sustaining, made for evening cups and slow nourishment.
 
Winter Alchemy is a drinking powder shaped for the dark months – a cup that steadies rather than stimulates, grounding the body with bitterness, warmth, and depth. It is built like the forest floor itself – root, seed, bark, and earth layered carefully and held in balance.
 
Roasted dandelion root forms the foundation – dark, bitter, and mineral, supporting digestion and lending a deep coffee-like body without sharpness. Cacao follows, rounded rather than sweet, paired with carob to soften the bitterness and bring a gentle malted warmth. Finely ground hemp seed adds body and nourishment, giving the drink a creamy texture and sustaining quality. Summer truffle runs quietly through the blend, lending umami depth and a low, woodland richness that is felt more than announced.
 
Spices are used with restraint. Cinnamon and cardamom bring warmth and lift, allspice adds quiet roundness, and pink peppercorn offers a faint aromatic spark at the edge. A small measure of sea salt anchors the whole, drawing the flavours together and deepening the finish.
 
In the cup, the drink opens slowly. Bitterness arrives first, then warmth and creaminess, followed by a lingering, earthy sweetness that settles into the body. This is not a sugary cacao, nor a stimulant. It is an evening drink, a winter elixir shaped to feed tired bones, warm the core, and support digestion through the dark.
 
This is drinking as ceremony. Each cup is an offering placed on the altar of the mouth, taken into the body as the earthly temple. Crafted to be returned to night after night, Winter Alchemy carries nourishment, comfort, and steadiness through repetition rather than intensity.
 
Flavour pairings
Oat milk, hazelnut milk, or dairy milk
Birch syrup, honey, or maple syrup if desired
Oatcakes or dark bread
Simple biscuits or plain cake
Quiet evenings and candlelight
Serving suggestions
Whisk 1½ tablespoons into 250 ml hot oat or hazelnut milk until smooth. Sweeten lightly only if desired – the blend is designed to be balanced without sugar. Best taken warm, in the evening, as a grounding winter drink.
Storage
Store airtight in a cool, dark cupboard away from moisture. Best enjoyed within 6 months. Aromatic truffle notes are at their peak within the first 3 months and soften naturally over time.
Winter Hearth Soulfoods – Mother Tongue of the Cailleach Country
The Winter Soulfoods collection is an immersive body of work set in Cailleach country – the boglands of Béarra – approached as ecosystem, archive, threshold, and kitchen. It imagines what it might mean to work from within the Cailleach’s own domain, drawing flavour, nourishment, and craft from deep ground, slow water, turf fire, and time.
The bog is not treated as symbol or backdrop. It is a keeper of strata – layers of matter and memory held intact. A place where time is thickened rather than spent. A preservative ground where fermentation, storage, and patience are not techniques, but ways of living in relationship with the land around you, and the land within you.
Within this terrain, food is ceremony and commitment. Ingredients are gathered as the year unfolds, worked slowly, and held back for winter – not for spectacle, but for sustenance. Fermentation, sap-sweetness, mineral depth, bitterness, and gentle heat shape flavours meant to be met with attention, feeding the body deeply, strengthening bones, warming, soothing, and replenishing marrow through the dark months.
These soulfoods are acts of natural pace and continuity – ways of staying in relationship with place, season, and deep time. Crafted through hand, hearth, and long devotion, they carry the quiet authority of a path walked faithfully, day after day, in preparation for the dark.