Fun with chocolate!
i’ve had a recipe for truffles printed and sitting around for awhile now. (Yet another thing i saw on Food Network.) A couple of weeks ago i bought the ingredients, but i’ve been in a bit of a funk lately and just didn’t feel like making them. Today seemed like the right time, with the house to myself. Quite a messy task, and not as simple as the recipe or the show made it seem - isn’t that always the case - but very tasty.
i started with a cup of heavy cream, a half a pound of semisweet choco, and half a pound of bittersweet choco, the latter two chopped up pretty small. i heated the cream until it just started to boil, then poured it through a sieve onto the chopped chocolate, and mixed until it was smoov to get this:
Lovely, shiny chocolate goo. i covered it with plastic to keep any curious pets out.
This is where i got impatient. It said to let the chocolate sit at room temperature for an hour or so to solidify so it could be molded into balls… After nearly two hours, the chocolate was still gooey, so i popped it into the fridge for a bit. Twenty minutes or so later, it was ready to be scooped.
Seriously. This was messy. But it was a delicious mess, because after i used the cookie scoop, i rolled it around in my hands to make a better looking shape. Mmm. Next came a bit more cooling, only about five minutes, because my hands heated up the chocolate and made them a bit gooey.
After shaping, i put the chocoballs on a tray, put toothpicks in, and rolled them around in a mix of cocoa and sugar - mostly cocoa.
The end result…
Now they sit in my refrigerator, covered with foil to keep curious tasters out.
Next time, i think i’m going to make them smaller. i also think it’d be fun to cover them with a chocolate shell (ganache!), and possibly try adding something else to the chocogoo before the initial cooling - orange liqueor is supposedly a good choice, but i was thinking maybe vanilla rum or something. We shall see. It was fairly easy to do, so i’ll definitely try it again, i’m sure.