I won’t pretend these aren’t bad for you. But if you’re going to eat chocolate, you’re better off eating good chocolate that satisfies with just a little bit. That’s why I switched to dark chocolate several years ago. One piece satisfies a chocolate craving. Unlike the leading brand, which is designed to be so bland you eat and eat and eat and never quite get enough chocolate to kill the craving.
These are little nuggets of yum that target the craving and kill it in one shot. Some people might go for a double-tap, “just to make sure,” but anything more than that is just showing off.
Ingredients
8 ounces semi-sweet chocolate
8 ounces dark bittersweet chocolate
2 tablespoons butter
1 cup heavy cream
Optional
4 ounces semi-sweet chocolate (for shell)
Directions
Did you read that introduction, where I said you should eat good chocolate? Let me say it again: Eat. Good. Chocolate. This recipe is like the brownies recipe. It’s mostly chocolate, so the quality of the ingredients you pick makes all the difference. I use Ghirardelli for both the semi-sweet and the dark bittersweet. My grocery store carries them, but you can order at those links. (I don’t make anything from recommending them.)
Now for the making, which is incredibly easy. Combine the butter and cream in a heavy-bottomed pan and bring to a rolling boil.
(It’s boiling, trust me. It’s hard to photograph white bubbles against a white background.)
Remove from heat and add the chocolate. If you got baking bars instead of chips, break them up first.
Stir until the chocolate is completely melted.
Pour the mixture out onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or wax paper.
At this point you’ve got two options. First, you can set the pan somewhere cool for 24 hours so it can cool and set up, then pull off little bits and roll them by hand. I’ve tried this method several times, and I guess my hands are too warm, because the truffles always melt before I get them round.
So I put the pan in the freezer for about a half-hour to firm up just a little before going on with the steps below. There are three variations, but all require a cookie press to do them.
First variation
Melt 1½ ounces semi-sweet chips in a heavy-bottomed pan or double boiler.
Add another ½ ounce of chips, remove from heat and stir until smooth.
This is a short-cut way of tempering the chocolate. Don’t temper and it will cool with a dull, soft finish, and will melt quickly in your hands. Temper it and you’ll get a hard, shiny finish that doesn’t melt so quickly. It’s really best to work with an instant-read thermometer and follow the guidelines in that link exactly.
Put a small amount of the tempered chocolate into a truffle mold. If you don’t have one … umm … don’t do this method, I guess.
Drop the mold from a few inches onto your work surface a few times to settle and knock any bubbles out of the chocolate.
Take some of the now-cool mixture from the baking sheet and load it into your cookie press.
(Yes, there are already some finished truffles in the background. I forgot to take this picture when doing the first batch.)
Put on the narrowest tip you have.
Place the tip down into the chocolate and fill until almost at the top of the mold.
There should be a dot where you injected the filling. Cover this with a little more tempered chocolate.
Don’t worry if they’re perfect, just mostly covered is fine.
Drop on the work surface again to smooth out the bottoms.
Place the mold in the freezer for at least a half-hour. Flip the mold over on top of a paper towel and rap each truffle with the back of a spoon to pop them out.
The finish looks dull because they’re covered with frost, fresh out of the freezer. They’re a little shiny when they defrost. If I were doing more of these, or if they needed to keep for a couple of days out of the freezer, I’d have paid more careful attention to the temperature when tempering the chocolate.
The second method
I still had the small tip on, so I deposited some centers directly on parchment paper on a baking sheet.
Then into the freezer for a half-hour. (Don’t worry, I’ll show you the shapes in a minute.)
The third method
Replace the small tip with a small star tip.
These came out looking really nice.
This is candy, after all
I told you when I did the second method that I’d show you the finished shapes, right?
Since the kids were going to be eating these, I thought I’d do some that looked like the puppy made them.
Oh who am I kidding. I thought it was funny.
And that’s it.
Want more like this? For more recipes like this, that you can hold right in your hands, and write on, take notes, tear pages out if you want (Gosh, you're tough on books, aren't you?) you might be interested in How To Cook Like Your Grandmother, 2nd edition, Illustrated. Or to learn your way around the kitchen, check out Starting From Scratch: The Owner's Manual for Your Kitchen.
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11 Comments
I love the suggestion of using a cookie press to do these truffles. I have the same ‘hot hands’ problem resulting in no truffles! I’ll get a cookie press and give these a shot. I have some candy molds just dying to be used for something!
1. I thought it was funny too, made me laugh for real.
2. I confess to consuming way too many dark chocolate M&Ms.
3. Time to rent Chocolat again.
The trouble with making this stuff? I’d eat it! But how easy is this recipe! Hmmmm I am really trying to talk myself into making these…
Martha, I prefer doing them without the mold and keeping them refrigerated until it’s time to serve. Saves a few steps, and goes a lot faster, unless you’ve got a bunch of molds.
Ted, try the Ghirardelli, then tell me if you still like M&Ms.
Barbara, you won’t eat them all at once, I promise. One at a time is good.
I used to work in a chocolate shop and the way we would make the truffles is pour the chocolate into the mold filling it up completely, tap it a bit to get all the bubbles out, then scrape the top off with a scraper, then put it in the freezer for a few minutes, just long enough to harden the outside while keeping the inside still liquid.
Then take the mold out of the freezer and flip it over to pour the middle out, scraping it off once it’s stopped dripping. Put it back into the freezer another minute or two to harden it completely, then take it out and let it come to room temperature. Then you pipe in your filling, leaving a bit of room at the top for the bottom layer.
For the bottom you pour more chocolate on top, scrape it off again, tap to get the bubbles out again and scrape again if need be, then back into the freezer for a few more minutes, no more than 5 or 10, just long enough for them to unstick from the mold, then take it out, and flip the mold over and they should fall out, if not tap gently, if they still don’t come out put them back into the freezer for a few more minutes and try again.
Which gives me an idea, I’ll have to make a blog entry sometime soon about that place.
Chocoletsa, I’ve seen that technique on TV a dozen times, and I’d really rather do it that way. But I’ll bet your molds had frames on them, right? Without frames, they’re too floppy to scrape efficiently. And with all the pouring and scraping, you need to be working with a big ‘ol pot of chocolate, not 2-4 ounces at a time, like you do at home. I never worked at a bakery, so I’m only annoyed-once-removed by how I have to do things.
Every time I make chili, I wish I could do it like at the restaurant: 20 pounds of ground beef, 3 gallons of tomato puree, 5 large onions, 10 large green peppers … Yeah, that’s how chili should be made. Learning to cut things down to family size means more than dividing the amounts. It’s whole different techniques.
I’ve always wanted to try my hand at making candies to give as little gifts – this is great! I’ll have to get a cookie press and give it a try
Not to be critical, but that is not a cookie press. Some may go looking for that and not be able to find it. Cookie presses have flat discs to press the dough through. That is a pampered chef decorator thing that has large tips for icing, etc. These look delicious Drew, I may have to try this soon before the weather gets too hot.
P.S. I only know this because I have both ….several cookie presses and the pampered chef decorator.
Wendy, thanks for the clarification. We used to have a cookie press — yes, with the flat disks — that also had the decorating tips. That broke sometime last year with a sugar cookie dough that was still a little too cold from the fridge. We had this, which works for the few things I used the cookie press for, so I still call it “the cookie press” even though I vaguely know that it’s not.
Good chocolate, cream, butter. Doesn’t look at all ‘bad for you’ to me.