EASY TRUFFLES TWO WAYS
A) Peanut Butter Balls
INGREDIENTS:
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup butter or margarine (1/2 stick)
3/4 cup butter or margarine (1 1/2 stick)
3/4 cup graham cracker crumbs
1 cup smooth peanut butter
12 oz. chocolate chips
DIRECTIONS:
1. Melt 1/4 c butter or margarine in a large bowl and cool slightly. Stir in brown sugar, graham cracker crumbs, and peanut butter until smooth -- the crumbs will contribute a slightly grainy texture, so don't worry if it feels gritty. Chill the mixture at least one hour, until firm.
2. Line a large cookie sheet with waxed paper. Form 1-inch balls of dough with a spoon roll between your palms, and place them on the cookie sheet. Chill again, if desired.
3. Line another cookie sheet with waxed paper. Melt chocolate chips with 3/4 cup butter or margarine in a wide-mouthed bowl, and stir until smooth. Using a fork, dip each ball into the chocolate mixture, shake off the excess, and place on paper. Chill in fridge or freezer, and enjoy!
B) Serious Espresso Truffles
INGREDIENTS:
1 cup ground espresso or dark roast coffee
1 cup heavy cream
15 ounces bittersweet chocolate chips
6 T (3/4 stick) butter
12 ounces bittersweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter or margarine
DIRECTIONS:
1. In a small saucepan, bring cream and espresso to a gentle simmer over low heat. Turn off heat and steep, covered, for 30 minutes. The grounds will not dissolve, but the cream should take on a tan color.
2. Strain cream mixture into medium saucepan, and warm over low heat. Add 15 ounces of chocolate chips, stirring constantly with whisk until smooth. Remove pan from heat, and add butter 2 Tbsp at a time, stirring until ganache is smooth. Cover with plastic wrap; chill until firm, at least 4 hours or overnight.
3. Line 2 cookie sheets with waxed paper and drop cold ganache onto sheets by heaping teaspoonfuls. Working quickly, roll between palms into balls. Chill balls in freezer, at least 1 hour.
4. Melt 12 ounces chocolate chips with butter or margarine, and follow step 3 of the PB Balls recipe. Garnish as you like!
(Adapted from Bon Appetit December 2003)
selected by Miriam
6 comments:
I was intimidated by the amount of work required to make these. So, I invited a bunch of friends over, served lunch and then we all got elbow deep in chocolate, making the truffles. Very fun but I still had to make the fillings on my own the night before because of the cooling time.
I doubled the recipes so that everyone could take some truffles home. I was shocked by how much chocolate I had to buy to meet the requirements of a doubled recipe. I used baker's chocolate bars instead of chips because there aren't chips in Ecuador and I think I had to buy 10 or 11 bars!!!
Did anyone else find the straining of the coffee out of the cream difficult for the espresso truffles? Maybe it was because I double the recipe but it took me an hour and ten minutes to strain the cream! It was not fun and I didn't go to bed until past 1am. I thought that making the filling for the peanut butter version was super quick and easy but it was fairly tedious for the espresso version.
When I was forming the the truffle balls, the espresso balls formed beautifully but I my peanut butter filling was too soft. I kept having to stick it back in the freezer and had to freeze the balls before dipping in chocolate. Did anyone else have this problem?
As for the final product...
I prefer the peanut butter version but could taste the butter which I didn't like. Also, mine had a weird gritty/crunchy texture. Did anyone else's? I think mine was because I didn't have graham crackers and had to use an alternative sweet craker. Maybe the butter flavor was for the same reason.
The texture and consistency of my espresso truffles was perfect; however, I felt that the coffee flavor was REALLY strong, though other eaters didn't agree. How did everyone else's turn out?
I enjoyed making truffles very much, but never realized how labor intensive it was. Now I have more appreciation to the homemade truffles!
I loved both flavors, but it seems that when I served the two different truffles, more people liked the espresso ones better.
I used regular coffee for the recipe and I wasn't sure if I was doing the right thing since the coffee absorbed all the cream and I was able to get a tiny bit of the extract of coffee cream... I might try with half and half and use less heating time next time.
For the ganache, I used fewer chips with the second one since when I followed the recipe at the first time, the ganache was too hard to dip. It worked better and easier to dip chocolate balls when I used 3/4 of the chips with the same amount of butter. I enjoyed especially the tasting part of the process (you have to taste it!) of making truffles.
I think that making truffles with friends is a great idea. Why didn't I think of that!
These recipes are definitely a multi-day or multi-chef project, so I appreciate that so many of you took the time to try them. (Kara -- sorry about the lost sleep!)
With the PB Balls, I've been making them for years, and I've also found that using butter in the filling leaves a discernible buttery taste that competes with the PB. Usually, I'm anti-margarine in general, but it does seem to work better for these, adding moisture but keeping its flavor on the down-low.
I like that the graham crackers add a crunch that mimics ground peanuts, so I'm curious as to whether anyone actually used peanuts instead of or in addition to the crumbs. (I've also thought that it would be fun to hide a whole peanut inside a ball.)
Annie and I had an opportunity to compare balls this weekend, and photos will follow, but I decided to separate mine from hers by drizzling a butterscotch stripe across the top, which was nothing special. (I was trying to use up the chips from that bar recipe we made a few months back.)
With the espresso truffles, I usually extract the steeped cream with an ordinary strainer, pushing on the grounds with a spoon, but some of the particles inevitably fall into the filling and lend a slight crunch and intense coffee flavor. (There are lots of commercially available chocolate bars with espresso bits inside, but it's probably something you love or hate...I love.)
To anyone thinking of trying these with liqueur, I've done it, and it's tasty. Mint and raspberry flavorings seem to work especially well.
The espresso filling is definitely hard to manipulate once it's chilled -- I actually gave myself a blister this time and spent the day whining about my chocolate-related injury. I heartily echo Maca's comment about the somewhat unappetizing appearance of the melted filling on one's hands.
I drizzled a white chocolate stripe over the espresso balls, which looked nice...did anyone try covering either recipe in white chocolate?
As a peanut butter hater, I only made the espresso truffles, but found it to be a fun cooking experiment (even though it was a bit labor intensive)! I don't think I would have tried making homemade truffles otherwise, so this was a good excuse. I also think I did far too much tasting throughout the process, and feel like I ate chocolate ALL day!
For the first portion of the process, I used half and half rather than cream, so for those of you interested in that option, I thought it worked well. It was still a little difficult to separate from the grounds, but I was not worried about some grains of coffee getting in there, so I was not too particular about it. I used a spoon back and pushed through a fine grained strainer... and also shook it back and forth a lot. It was fast and I felt I had plenty of coffee cream to work with. The ganache came together nicely, but it was a work out getting the chilled ganache out of the pan. My hands did get messy at times, but I found that if I rinsed my hands in very cold water every so often it helped the chocolate not melt as much as I rolled the chocolate into balls.
For the second part of the process, I used the amounts indicated, but felt I had a lot of extra dipping leftover. Perhaps mine are more thinly covered than they should be. I saved the extra in some tupperware, but I am not sure what I am saving it for. I also did a drizzle/splatter of white chocolate across mine, and they look lovely. I forgot to take a photo last night, but will do so and post it soon. I will be serving them at a party this Saturday, so stay tuned for reviews....
I only made the peanut butter truffles and while they tasted pretty good, I did not like the process and mine looked horrible!! I couldn't get the consistency right. After an overnight stint in the fridge, the truffles were still pretty loose and I had a tough time dipping them in the chocolate, which turned out to be way too thin anyway. I must have done something wrong. So, while the truffles were tasty, they looked nasty and I never would have served them to company. Not sure I'll try this recipe again anytime soon though the expresso ones sound delish!
One of the thrilling bonuses of this club is discovering that our world is more diverse than I ever knew. Are there are really people out there who don't like chocolate? And peanut butter? Wild!
Anyway, I'm glad to hear that the half-and-half worked for the truffles...I imagine it might make the filling a little softer, too. (Not to mention healthier, of course!) I did once try the PB balls with reduced fat PB, but I didn't love the results.
I forgot to mention that I threw some cocoa powder into the espresso filling to add more bitterness, so the result might have been closer to Maca's with the unsweetened chocolate.
Laura, that extra ganache is tasty on strawberries (on sale at Whole Foods this week), which was where ours wound up!
Glad to hear that everyone found these a little laborious. The week I made mine, I kind of went psycho-Martha and made a chocolate hazelnut tart, lemon danishes, and a strawberry mousse tart, and I got kind of stressed by the end of it all. Does anyone else dream of hiring a staff for cleanup?
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