Valentine’s Truffles
To raise money for our Relay for Life Team (which you should totally donate to for cancer research), I took orders for Valentine’s chocolate truffles.
Although these sound fancy and complicated, truffles are actually fairly easy to make. All you really need to do is heat 4 tbsp butter with 1 cup of heavy cream until the butter melts. Then remove it from the heat and stir in 16 oz of semisweet chocolate chips or chopped chocolate until they become smooth and melt. This is called tempering.
Heavy Cream + Butter + Chocolate = Ganache!
Honestly, you can just eyeball the amount of chocolate added. I always try to sneak in a bit more chocolate for a densely chocolatized end product.
Another shot of that ganache
Essentially what you end up making is ganache, oh so decadent ganache. Cool and then chill the ganache for up to 4 hours or overnight, and voila! TRUFFLES. The rest is just rolling the thick solid ganache into little truffle balls, which everyone helped out with. The key to rolling these little nubs is to keep your hands cold and to do it quickly, so they don’t melt in your hands. This isn’t much of an issue for me since I have low body temperature to begin with, but if your hands tend to be warm, stick them in ice cold water before you begin.
Truffles rolled in hazelnut cocoa powder.
Once you have the ganache balls, you can coat them in cocoa powder, nuts, confectioner’s sugar, or melted chocolate to achieve a chocolate shell. Since I had to make a large number of these in a short time, I just rolled them around in Ghiradelli hazelnut hot cocoa powder. I thought the slight hazelnut flavor added a nice Ferrero Rocher-ish dimension.
Happy Valentine's Day!
And they were a hit!! (with both the customers and my suiteys) so I was really pleased. I didn’t add any special liquor or even vanilla extract, so there wasn’t much flavor aside from rich chocolate, but hey who doesn’t love chocolate? Even my friends who don’t like chocolate thought the truffles were pretty amazing. So keep this recipe in mind next year Valentine’s if you got someone to impress. They’re a lot simpler than they look!
These truffles look so good! Gotta try them sometime :]
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