momiji

I know V-Day was last week, but I was sick and busy with midterms, so I had no time to make tasty chocolates for people. I'm still sick, but on spring break, so I just spent a chunk of my afternoon making truffle filling. A secret I will share with you all: people who've never tried making them think making truffles are really hard. They wrong - it's messy, yes, but hard? Not really. So making them is a really good way to impress people with your mad cooking skillz. And to that end, I'm going to share my recipes with you guys.


Making truffles generally follows the same basic steps - there are a few recipes out there that include stuff like crushed nuts or cake crumbs in the filling, but I don't use those, because I like nice smooth chocolate fillings. These steps are:

1) Boil heavy cream and butter together.
2) Add flavouring (optional)
3) Add chocolate
4) Chill filling in fridge
5) Roll into balls
6) Coat
7) Enjoy

For steps 1 and 3, I have two different ratios I use. One is 2/3 cup cream, 2 tablespoons butter, 6 ounces chocolate. The other is 3 tablespoons cream, 1/4 cup butter, and 4 ounces chocolate. The second makes less truffles, but is slightly more melty.

For flavouring, some options: 2 tea bags, added in right before the cream boils and then squeezed out and removed before the chocolate goes in (I like Earl Grey personally), one heaping teaspoon of instant coffee for mocha truffles, 2 to 3 teaspoons of your favorite booze (you don't need really exact measurments, as it's a flavour thing - amaretto is particularly good IMO), or, for the chocolate loving purists, nothing at all.

For chocolate, you can really use whatever your heart desires - I buy chocolate chips because they're cheaper than the squares of baking chocolate, and honestly, work just as well. The measurements are by weight, though, so if you're using normal-sized chips and don't have a scale, multiply the numbers given by 1.5 to get the approximate number of fluid ounces needed (yeah, I figure out conversion factors. I'm a nerd). I usually use semi-sweet, because it's cheap and not too overwhelmingly sugary, or dark chocolate if I'm feeling expensive.

For coating, you can just roll the filling balls in powdered sugar, cocoa powder, or hot chocolate mix, but I find this only works well if you ended up with very firm filling. So I prefer to melt some more chocolate (in either a double boiler, or very, very carefully in the microwave), dip the filling balls in, and then stick them back in the fridge to harden.

So go forth and make truffles - I have batches of mocha, Earl Grey, rum, amaretto, and dark chocolate chilling in my fridge.