One of my favorite Tasty segments is “Make It Fancy” ! Rie is one of my favs and she does this fun challenge where she is given something not fancy and tried to make it fancy! I saw her do this with twinkies and I did my own version of it with oatmeal cream pies!

Confession: I’ve never had a twinkie so I didn’t want to use them. I wasn’t allowed snacks like this when I was a child but sometimes we got by with grabbing oatmeal cream pies from the shelf! I wanted to make this childhood treat a little fancier.

Confession #2: When I tried the Oatmeal Cream Pie, it wasn’t as delicious as I remember it!

This is an entire box of oatmeal cream pies (12). I just smashed them up and to make them stick together I used 2 tablespoons of brewed hojicha.

Once you make the balls whatever size you’d like, place them on a baking sheet and keep them in the freezer for 30 minutes to an hour until they are not sticky anymore.

You can make these into cake pops like Rie did but I just wanted to make messy bite sized shapes. The chocolate I used was bittersweet melting wafers. The reason I used bittersweet chocolate was to counteract the sweetness of the oatmeal cream pies.

You might notice some bumps on this chocolate and that’s because I added in chopped walnuts. I think walnuts go really well with both the small amount of hojicha in these as well as the bittersweet chocolate. It also gives these a little bit of crunch!

Dipping these into the chocolate was a bit messy, as you can see there were small puddles created around them. While I like the extra chocolate you can totally use a cake pop stick to dip these like Rie did!

The combination of the very sweet oatmeal cream pies with the hojicha is offset by the bittersweet chocolate and walnuts. You get the right amount of sweet instead of sickly sweet!

Dip in your favorite type of milk for that extra childhood effect! :)

What do you think? Did I succeed in making oatmeal cream pies fancy?!

Have you ever tried hojicha? It is a delightful roasted green tea and while I love to drink it, I’ve always thought the flavor would make a great addition to sweets!

Hojicha has such a rich flavor I thought that truffles would make a great combo. Instead of infusing the tea into the truffles I decided to make powder of it.

I used the hojicha gold powder from Hojicha Co. but they also sell a powder if you’d like to skip the crushing!

I crushed the hojicha and walnuts with a mortar and pestle and then mixed it with the chopped chocolate!

Truffles are so easy to make, all you need to do is heat the heavy cream and pour them over the chocolate. After letting the chocolate and heavy cream sit for a few minutes, mix well and refrigerate for several hours until solid.

Once the truffles are solidified, take a tablespoon or whatever size you want your truffles and round them out. You can roll the truffles in whatever topping you’d like. I chose coconut! I thought that coconut and the nutty flavor of the hojicha + walnut flavor would go well together.