Team Truffle

Welcome back friends! I was a little slow on this blog post since I’ve already started my brand new, shiny, awesome job that currently comes with a 1.5 hour commute each way. In case you were wondering, that commute makes you very tired when you get home and you just don’t want to blog. But here I am because this was a super fun one. Before my grand departure from UConn, I decided that I wanted to make a treat to give my advisor. So, I decided that truffles would be perfect (mostly because I’ve been wanting to make truffles again) and I invited my friend over to help me with the truffles. Because it’s fun. Now, I could have just made one type of truffle and called it a day. But that’s not fun, nor is it insane. Instead we decided to make four types of truffles: Ebony and Ivory (which you may recall from the last time I made them), Oreo, Caramel, and Cookie Dough (which was my very first baking adventure that I blogged about!). Two repeats, two newbies, and a whole lot of chocolate! 

We started bright and early and spent a fair amount of time trying to decide on a good strategy. Then we gave up and just dove right in. Now it’s been a while so I may get the timeline wrong but I’ll give it a shot. I believe we started with the cookie dough ones so we could eat some cookie dough. Always a good plan. Plus they had to refrigerate for a while before being dipped in chocolate. I love how easy those cookie dough ones are. The only downside, of course, being the process of can opening. The recipe calls for condensed milk and I always forget how thick that is and try to use the poke-a-hole type of can opener instead of a legit one because I’m lazy. So yeah, it made a bit of a mess. But otherwise, it was super duper easy. We got our hands nice and dirty rolling them into balls but it was delicious so who cares? We threw them in the fridge and were amazed that with two people, the process only took about half an hour.

Oh! Now I remember how this actually went down! Ok, you see how I painted this lovely picture of us doing one thing at a time? That’s TOTALLY not how that happened. Before we started anything, we attacked the caramels. We had to unwrap about 26 of them and caramels (in case you didn’t already know) are kinda sticky. So that took a while. But the reason we did this first was because for the caramel truffles, we had to melt the caramels together with the chocolate, pour into a pan, refrigerate, then slice and roll into balls, and refrigerate again. Once all those suckers were unwrapped, I got to melting them on the stove while my friend started the cookie dough truffles. It sort of feels like we were both doing everything though because she needed help finding things in my kitchen (which is not organized logically at all) and I needed help with things like noticing that the caramels were practically boiling. Whoops. I get easily distracted. So the cookie dough and caramel ones wrapped at almost the same time. I have to compliment the author of the caramel recipe for the cool trick of lining a pan with plastic wrap, pouring the caramel mixture in and then just flipping them out after they cool for cutting and rolling. It was actually easy. Oh, I should mention that this recipe comes from my very first baking book, the Taste of Home Best Recipes 2010 cookbook. I missed using that book. It’s got such cute ideas.

For round two, we decided to divide and conquer. My friend was in charge of the Oreo truffles so I can’t really comment on those besides saying that they’re super delicious. I was in charge of the Ebony and Ivory truffles from the Death By Chocolate cookbook. If you recall, the last time I tried that one, my kitchen ended up covered in chocolate, I used the wrong chocolate, and I broke a whisk. I was endeavoring to avoid that this time. I was moderately successful. The first thing was that I actually used the correct type of chocolate. Then I did the whole boiling cream and using it to melt chocolate thing. This time I actually had metal bowls and didn’t have to use Pyrex bowls (which kinda don’t conduct heat). The cream melted the chocolate much better than last time but still needed a little help so I just put the bowls on top of the still-hot burners. I have an electric stove so the residual heat was just enough to finish the melting. I won’t get into the details of the timing of stirring, sitting, refrigerating, and all that because I already discussed that last time but suffice it to say that I set timers and was very careful to not screw it up. It went much better than last time but there was still the issue that on the last stir, the ebony part of the chocolate truffle got pretty hard and tried to break my whisk. I think the timing is just slightly off and maybe the last refrigeration period should be eliminated.

Anyway, at this point, my friend was done with her Oreo things for a bit so she helped me with rolling the truffles. Alas, same problem as last time. The white chocolate is still super oily and sticky and it made our hands a mess and made slightly deformed truffles. But we got it done pretty quickly and once they were rolled, we chucked them in cocoa so that hid the ugliness. Voila! Complete.

After this, there was more chocolate melting but it was all a bit of a blur. I was in charge of cutting the caramel truffles and rolling them into balls. However, I noticed that if I was moving too slowly, the balls started to flatten out. So I rushed through rolling them and tossed them in the fridge thinking that the coldness would slow the process. A few minutes later, I checked on them and they were all pretty flattened. My friend and I tried to reroll and fix them but we were just not quite fast enough and they ended up as disc-like truffles. Bad physics. Very bad physics.

The final step was dipping the cookie dough balls in chocolate. I was tired of melting chocolate so I pulled some ultimate ganache out of the freezer and melted that and dipped the cookie dough balls in that. And by “I”, I totally mean my friend who got really good at using spoons to dip the balls so that they looked neat and tidy and didn’t make a big mess.

So there we were, looking at four pans of truffles. They looked depressingly ugly to be honest. But we were proud that we made four types of truffles within about 3 hours.  The truffles still had some more refrigerating to go and my friend had to leave so I was in charge of packing them up and delivering the next day.

 Never underestimate the power of a good candy tin.

As ugly as these looked on the pans, they looked downright professional once they were put into candy tins in an assorted fashion. We could probably sell these for at least ten bucks a tin. So I put together a bunch of tins of truffles and they look lovely:

As far as the taste, shame on the baker because I still haven’t tried them all. I ate several of the Oreo ones (which are fantastic) and a few of the cookie dough ones (which are also pretty darn good but too sweet to eat more than one at a time). I just tonight tried one of the Ebony and Ivory ones. They're super delicious on the inside but I think that the cocoa on the outside is just a little bit too bitter. It'd be better with a thin milk chocolate coating I think. The inside is just top notch though. I haven’t touched the caramel ones. They’re still in my fridge. My fiancé tried them and informed me that the caramel ones are good but very hard because, duh, caramel. Shrug. I just haven’t been craving chocolate lately. I’ve been pawning them off to anyone I can think of including my chiropractor and friends that invited us over to dinner. Oh well. The moral of the story is this: Baking with friends is much easier and much more fun and you don’t have to be a professional to make some pretty professional-looking treats.

No Disney Moment this week. My sister and I are still trying to summon the will to watch Brother Bear. Once we do, I’ll have enough material for rankings I think. By the way, be on the lookout for another post really soon. It’ll be my last time baking in my kitchen before I move! Madness!