Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present the 1st part in a series of recipe posts.  Todays recipe: Chocolate truffles.  I made these a couple of weeks ago, much to the chagrin of my co-workers and relatives.  These will “put pounds on you”, as the late Wesley Willis was fond of saying. So here goes…

Ingredients:

• 1 pound of dark chocolate (or any other kind of chocolate, but dark is best)
• 1 cup of heavy whipping cream
• Unsweetened cocoa

Instructions:

• First, use a large serrated knife to saw the dark chocolate into manageabley small shards. Be careful not to eat too much chocolate or cut yourself and place the chocolate into a large bowl. Next, scald the heavy cream in a saucepan. For those of you that are not professional confectioners like me (wink, wink), scalding means heating the milk almost to a boil, but not quite all the way. Got that? Good. This is where it gets fun.  Pour the scalding milk over the chocolate in the bowl and let it stand for 5 minutes. The milk basically melts the chocolate for you, so there’s no double-boiler or burnt chocolate.
• Once you’ve let the chocolate melt, begin stirring the chocolatey-cream mixture manically until it is a deliciously smooth consistency, making sure all the pieces are melted.  This wonderful substance is called ganache.  Now you want to let this good stuff cool in the fridge for about 2-3 hours.  Cooling it allows the ganache to harden to the point where it can be molded.
• When the ganache has hardened, you’re ready for the final steps.  Use a #70 size ice cream scoop, or a melon baller and extract the chocolate from the bowl, placing the balls onto a cookie sheet, plate, tray, whatever. At this point, I like to let the suckers chill again for about another 15 minutes in the fridge, so they don’t get too melty. Then, roll ‘em in the unsweetened cocoa, and voila! Chocolate Truffles!

Variations 

• Obviously there are many variations to this recipe. You can use different chocolates, put nuts, fruit or liquor in the chocolate  and/or coat the truffles with nuts, hard chocolate or anything else you want.

Have a Happy Christmahannukwanzikaa! 

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