Belated Valentine’s Day Chocolate Truffles

For Valentine’s Day, I was look­ing for both a project and a way to save some money. I mean, I love my fam­ily and friends, but $18.00 a pound is a lit­tle much for choco­lates. For­tu­nately, the March 2008 edi­tion of Fine Cook­ing has an arti­cle on the won­ders of choco­late ganache, and how to make truf­fles from the base ganache recipe. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s not avail­able with­out reg­is­ter­ing for a “free trial” of their site prefa­tory to a paid sub­scrip­tion, even if you’re a sub­scriber to the mag­a­zine. For­tu­nately, I tweaked the recipe, so I can repro­duce the adapted recipe in full for you.

Home­made, impress your mother-in-law choco­late truf­fles
Adapted from March 2008 Fine Cook­ing, orig. recipe by Greg Case and Keri Fisher

Note: I made a dou­ble batch of the ganache and melted choco­late por­tions of the recipe.

Basic Ganache:

10 oz. dark choco­late, 2 oz. milk choco­late (or 12 oz. semi­sweet, total)
1 cup heavy cream
1 tea­spoon sea salt or kosher salt– don’t use iodized

Chop choco­late roughly, or put it into a gallon-sized ziploc bag and whack it with a meat ten­der­izer or a rolling pin or a rub­ber mal­let until bro­ken into no more than 1 inch sized chunks. Put into food proces­sor fit­ted with chop­ping blade, and pulse until choco­late is in small, pebble-sized chunks. Heat the cream to just under a boil in the microwave, appx. 3 min­utes on 70% power. When the cream is heated through, add it and the salt to the food proces­sor bowl. Cover and pulse until the choco­late is melted.

Choco­late Truf­fles:

2 tbsp. salted but­ter
8 oz. semi­sweet choco­late or 6 oz. dark, 2 oz. milk
1/2 c. to 1 c. each of desired top­pings: chopped dried cher­ries, chopped can­died gin­ger, toasted chopped nuts such as almonds, hazel­nuts, or pis­ta­chios, shred­ded unsweet­ened coconut, cocoa pow­der, cin­na­mon sugar

Add two table­spoons salted but­ter to the food proces­sor along with the cream, and pulse until incorporated.

Trans­fer ganache to a bowl and refrig­er­ate two hours or overnight. If refrig­er­ated overnight, let stand 30 min­utes before scooping.

Lay out your top­pings in bowls big enough to allow you to toss the truf­fle in the top­ping with two forks.

With a tea­spoon, or a teaspoon-sized cookie scoop, scoop the ganache into rounds. Inter­mit­tently dip the spoon/scoop in a glass of hot tap water and wipe on a tea towel to remove excess ganache, to ease scoop­ing. Place the ganache balls on a cookie sheet lined with parch­ment or wax paper. If you like, you can roll the balls in a lit­tle cocoa pow­der and then in your hands to make them rounder. I didn’t do this step, as I like the slightly irreg­u­lar shapes.

Melt roughly chopped choco­late in a wide, deep bowl in the microwave, appx. 5 mins. at 50% power. If you heat it on higher power, the choco­late on the bot­tom may burn. There may still be chunks of choco­late when you remove the bowl– stir them into the melted choco­late on the bot­tom of the bowl. It should all melt, fairly quickly. If needed, heat for 1 min. at 70% to melt the rest of the chocolate.

Work­ing a top­ping at a time, coat the ganache balls in the melted choco­late by rolling them in the bowl with two forks. Using the forks, drop the truf­fle into the top­ping bowl, toss­ing to coat. Replace the truf­fle on the cookie sheet, and repeat. I did one top­ping at a time, because the forks get gunky with the melted choco­late and the top­ping, and have to be scraped off inter­mit­tently. I rinsed my forks off in between toppings.

Let the truf­fles dry a half hour before toss­ing them down your gul­let like Cookie Mon­ster. To store, line a con­tainer with parchment/wax paper, and place more paper between lay­ers. The truf­fles do need to be refrig­er­ated if not eaten imme­di­ately– let them sit 20 to 40 min­utes at room tem­per­a­ture before serving.

The ini­tial ganache part takes no time at all, but the melt­ing and rolling and coat­ing can take quite a bit of time, espe­cially if you have four dozen truf­fles to coat, and you’re work­ing by your­self. I laid out my assem­bly line on the liv­ing room cof­fee table, and watched All About Eve as I worked.

These are, with­out a doubt, the best truf­fles I’ve ever had, includ­ing ones I had in Paris and at fancy-schmancy restau­rants.  The fresh­ness makes a dif­fer­ence– the fill­ing is so soft and creamy, the top­pings so fresh and crunchy, and the melted choco­late hard­ens into a snappy, crunchy mid­dle layer.  I’m not a choco­late fiend, but these are some­thing spe­cial.  A break­fast of cham­pi­ons with a rose cham­pagne, too.  (Just kid­ding.  I had tofu links and V8 for break­fast.  And only one truf­fle for dessert.)

Eat and Enjoy!