I’ve had it in my head to make truffles for a while now. Today seemed a perfect day to do so. My friend Kate agreed to join me in the truffle adventure, so I was assured some lovely company and help in making the truffles. It started with a trip to Trader Joes to pick up necessary truffle supplies – chocolate, more chocolate, an embarrassing amount of chocolate, and some heavy cream for good measure. Then to home to start the truffle making progress.
The first step was to stand, astounded, at the amount of chocolate on my cutting board:
This picture doesn’t give an indication of the proper scale of those blocks of chocolate. Each of those blocks weighed a little over half a pound.
After standing impressed for a while I got to work. Each block had to be chopped up into small pieces.
This is one block chopped up. I only had nine more to go. (I’m extraordinarily lucky I didn’t lose a finger, might I add.)
Upon chopping up the chocolate and dividing it into five different bowls, I heated cream and poured the hot cream over the chocolate to melt the chocolate into a ganache. The ganache forms the center of the truffle and is the most important component of the truffle.
One ganache was flavored with Cointreau.
Another was flavored with chipotle chile powder.
The ganache went into the refrigerator to chill and Kate and I got to work preparing other components of the truffle.
We decided to decorate the orange truffles with twisted orange rinds. So we had to zest the oranges.
It was hard work.
We also had to melt and temper chocolate to dip the truffles in.
Once the ganache was ready, we rolled the ganache into little balls and dipped it into the tempered chocolate.
This was messy. And rather fun.
The dipped ganache was then either rolled or sprinkled with a little somethin’ somethin’.
The end result?
A whole lotta truffles.
We ended up with six different types of truffles:
The back row, from left to right: amaretto truffle rolled in almonds, chipotle chile truffle sprinkled with cinnamon and cocoa, espresso truffle.
The front row, from left to right: orange truffle sprinkled with cocoa and topped with an orange rind, mint truffle, orange truffle sprinkled with cinnamon and cocoa.
They’re sitting on the table, just begging to be wrapped and packaged and savored. Mmmm.
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You are a goddess among mortals. (Why must I be so fiscally irresponsible?!)
You also obviously have job prospects outside of academia. :)
Yum!!!!
Are you bringing me some for Christmas???? Tay & I are sitting here drooling, and Tay LOVED the picture of you with the messy, chocolaty hands. She giggled. ;) I know what you can give me for christmas!!! Really & Truly! ;)
Oh, and Tay had a shut-out today in her game. It was 8 to 0. Granted her team (of 10&under girls) was playing against a team of 6 through 8 year olds, but still… ;)
TTYS. Your older sis.
Michael: ha! Truffle making is actually quite tedious…we spent four hours rolling and dipping and sprinking more than 200 little balls of chocolate. I actually prefer cooking yummy things like soups and savory dishes to playing with chocolate. Which is good, I guess, because soups are just a little bit more healthy than truffles! :-)
Kati: There will be truffles brought home for everyone. That was most of the reason that I wanted to make them (well, that and because truffles are delicious balls of chocolately goodness!). I just hope they survive the trip home! But no, that won’t be your Christmas present, because I’m thoroughly excited about what your Christmas present actually is that I won’t let you rob me of my chance to be excited about your present by making me give you boring ol’ truffles instead. Sorry. :-) And I have a feeling that Tay giggled at the picture because being covered in chocolate is just about anybody’s idea of a really good time. I’m actually surprised that I didn’t have more chocolate all over me by the time I was done with the evening! Tay will definitely get a truffle, by the way, if only for being such a hockey superstar! Give her a big hug for me and tell her that I’m quite proud of her. I hope that I get to watch a game or two when I’m home!
hehe, I made truffles back in the spring and am going to be making them as christmas presents this year. it’s always fun to see the different flavor concoctions people come up with. my favorite so far has been dusting a plain chocolate truffle in a mixture of cinnamin and cayenne pepper. mmmm, makes the lips tingle ;)