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Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

65. Chocolate Truffles p.696

The recipe.

This recipe has three ingredients, chocolate, cream, and cocoa powder. Almost by definition the success of failure of the recipe is in the quality of those ingredients, and the method of combining them. I used the wrong ingredients, and ignored parts of the method. They still came out tasty, if a bit ugly. The recipe calls for 56% cacao Valrhona chocolate, I ignored this and used another good quality dark chocolate with about the same cocoa percentage. I couldn’t find the Valrhona and decided the recipe was just being snooty. I’m not sure if it would have made a difference, but you should definitely use a chocolate you like the taste of before it’s used in the ganache.

The recipe is dead simple, the cream is boiled, and then poured over the cut up chocolate, it’s then gently stirred (in concentric circles starting from the centre, while standing on one leg, under a full moon). The resultant ganache is then cooled and piped into truffle shapes. After the truffles are frozen they’re smeared with bit of melted chocolate and tossed in cacao powder before serving.

I ran into a bit of trouble in the piping section of the recipe. I didn’t have the right size tip and found I couldn’t pipe and elegant looking truffle with the desired soft point on top. Even cooling the ganache for the recommended time I needed to put in in the fridge for a while to get it to firm up enough for easy piping. As you can see in the picture above I didn’t get anything near the elegant teardrop shaped confections I was going for. Real truffles are ugly and misshapen, and so are mine. I’m not going to let myself feel too bad about it.

The coating with chocolate and tossing in cacao powder step was much messier than I would have predicted. I think it takes a lot more planning, and forethought than I gave it. You need to reserve one gloved hand for smearing the chocolate and dropping the truffles into the cocoa powder, and one hand for extracting them to a sheet pan on the other end. Mixing this method up results in the dreaded club hand. I’ll know better for next time.

Although this was a really simple recipe I have hardly any experience working with confections. I found it to be more complicated than it seemed at first. But, I’m sure a second attempt would go much more smoothly. Flavourwise, they were good. It’s chocolate and cream, it tastes like chocolate and cream. Fancy chocolatiers seem to be able to take those same ingredients and make absolute magic happen. For me, this recipe produced tasty little after dinner treats, but there was nothing transcendent about it.

By KC

I'm a graduate student in Montreal. I spend most of my time studying drug addiction using brain imaging techniques. I'm also a foodie, exploring the culinary world both in and out of my kitchen.

1 reply on “65. Chocolate Truffles p.696”

I make truffles every year at christmas…the dipped ones, not the cocoa powdered ones.

I attempted the piping thing; it did not work for me so I use a spoon & scoop them, and roll them -this does not work if your hands are really warm,they just melt. It does give you something closer to a ball though.

When it comes time to coat them in melted chocolate, I’ve discovered the easiest thing is to put a ‘well’ of melted chocolate in the palm of one hand and use a finger of the other hand to roll the truffle around. This allows you an even, thin coat and leaves you with four digits free to move them from the cocoa after.

If you try it again – good luck! If you can get them presentable they make a great gift.

One other tip – if you’re looking to flavour them you’ve got a few options. One is to use store bought flavourings, the other liquours and finally by flavouring your cream prior to adding it to the chocolate with natural items like mint, strawberries etc. I haven’t tried this method yet but it’s supposed to create a nice flavour. I may just try it this year.

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