Truffles

Now that Christmas has come and gone, and the truffles have been received (and probably eaten), I can post about my truffles.

Let me first say a HUGE thank you to The Pioneer Woman, who told me the recipe on her blog – have a look here, there’s a pictorial step by step guide, unlike mine I’m afraid! I took her recipe, removed the Sea salt (I’m sure it’s lovely, but wasn’t what I was aiming for), compared her measurements to other webpages, to check how the American measurements compared to the British ones.

I ended up doing two batches of truffles, one with Green and Blacks chocolate, and one with Sainsburys Belgian dark chocolate

Here’s the ingredients:

150g melted, with all of this   stirred in. Add a teaspoon of (mmm vanilla!)

Cover withor

OR

150g melted, with all of this   stirred in. Add a teaspoon of (mmm vanilla!)

Cover withor

(Just don’t pay any attention to the red sections of the pie chart, or you’ll never make this!)

OK, a bit more detail hey?!

You need 150g of a dark chocolate, the better the chocolate and higher cocoa content the better. You need to melt the chocolate, the easiest method I find is to break the chocolate up and put it in a glass bowl, which is over a saucepan of water (preferably the bowl is big enough not to touch the pan or water, but fits inside the pan a bit). Heat up the water, and keep an eye on the chocolate, stiring it once it starts to melt, and turning the heat off soon after – even if there are a few lumps, they’ll melt, it’s more important not to overheat (and ruin) the chocolate.

Add the whole of a 397g tin of condensed milk to the melted chocolate and stir. I see it’s possible to get light condensed milk, but really not sure what that would do, so stayed with the unhealthy treat angle!

Leave the yummy gooey mixture to cool down, you want to put it into the fridge, without heating up your fridge! It needs to cool in the fridge for a few hours.

Now comes the messy part. Now I tried two methods. The first, and most messy was to scoop out some mixture and roll it in the palm of my hands to make it into balls, then lay on a tray/greaseproof paper. This works, but is very messy, sticky and cold! The second method was to scoop up the mixture into the right amount, pull it off spoons and straight onto a tray. The balls need to go into the freezer, and if your freezer is anything like ours (a fridge freezer, with not a lot of flat space available), finding space for that many balls is not easy. I did quite a few batches! I ended up finding the easiest thing to use was a large casserole lid (and cover it with greaseproof). They need to sit in the freezer for at least 15mins, so that they are hard and no longer sticky.

I then melted some chocolate to cover the truffles. I decided to cover some with milk chocolate and some with white. Having melted the chocolate, take the container off the heat (so it can cool a little). Lay some greaseproof paper across a worktop, find a spoon, a fork and either some cocktail sticks or wooden skewers (I used the later, as they were easier to find). Take the truffles out of the freezer, roll them between your palms if needed (if you made lumps, you will be able to turn them into balls at this stage without too much mess). Drop a truffle into the melted chocolate, and use the spoon to cover it with chocolate. Pick up the truffle with the fork, and allow the excess chocolate to pour off (helps to give it a gentle tap too). Put the truffle onto the greaseproof paper, using the stick/skewer to remove it. See Pioneer Womans post for a great pic of this. You can also use the stick to scratch a line in the run off chocolate.

If you are adding something on top, now is the time – before the chocolate hardens, be quick! I put some chocolate curls (which I got from Morrisons) on top.

Another idea, which I considered, but never did in the end, would be to drizzle a different type of chocolate over the top – so white over milk, or milk over white. Once the chocolate is hardened, I found that I needed to check the bottoms of the truffles, and covering any areas not covered in chocolate.

Once finished, put them in the fridge to keep them at their best. Then the most important part: eat and enjoy!!