Chocolate truffles recipe

2 easy and proven chocolate truffle recipes that even your kids can make, so you can enjoy delicious and cheap chocolate sweets whenever you feel like it.

What are chocolate truffles?

They are chocolate confectioneries with the odd form of a truffle mushroom, covered in cocoa powder. These sweet treats are actually made from what is called a "ganache", which typically will be a mixture of:

• chocolate
• cream and/or butter
• a bit of alcohol (rum, Grand Marnier…) and other ingredients for extra flavor

Ingredients of chocolate

The basic ingredients of chocolate are:

• cocoa powder (cocoa solids) and
• cocoa butter.

The purest (dark) chocolate you can buy contains lots of solids and little butter.

To counter the typical bitter taste, sugar will be added. When milk powder or condensed milk is added, it will be sold as milk chocolate.

In lots of chocolate for sale in the supermarket, cocoa butter will be replaced with cheaper (trans) fat. To prologue the shelf life, preservatives will be added.

When possible, buy the darkest, purest chocolate you can find. As such you will know exactly what you will be eating when making your own truffles. Cocoa powder – and in a lesser amount pure chocolate – , contains flavonols that has blood pressure lowering qualities. It also contains alkaloids – the most known to be caffeine – that could enhance your mood.

Using pure chocolate with cream, butter and sugar will results in chocolate truffles that can only be stored in the fridge for no longer than 1 month. Any (supermarket) truffles you buy that have a longer shelf life, contain preservatives and other additives that aren’t beneficial for your health. Stay away from those and make them yourself: better for your health and better to the taste. And best of all: preparing them is so easy, that even a child can do it!

How to make smooth chocolates: never burn them!

What’s most important when making homemade chocolates, is that you don’t burn the chocolate whilst melting it. You won’t see any difference when the temperature gets to high, but once the chocolate cools down, it won’t feel smooth anymore when it melts in your mouth. The easiest way not to burn your chocolate is heating up cream, taking the cream from the fire and melting the chocolate into the warm cream.

The common way is using a warm-water bath (au bain marie), which can be made easily with 2 stainless steal pots: the bottom pot filled with boiled water, the top pot filled with your chocolate filling, like so:

Chocolate cream filling recipe

In the above au bain marie pot, the ganache is made with:

• 4 3/8 ounce (125 gr) brown cooking chocolate (this already has sugar inside, so it is not as pure as I would have liked, but it was available in the shop next door)
• 2 fluid ounce (60 ml) double cream (40+ % fat)
• 1 fluid ounce (30 ml) Kahlua (a coffee liquor)
• 1/2 ounce (15 gr) non liquid honey
• 1 egg yolk

How to make this easy chocolate truffles recipe

1. To speed things up, I grated the chocolate.
2. Add grated chocolate, cream and honey in the top pot, let the chocolate melt and stir until all is mixed.
3. Take the pot out of the warm water pot, and add the egg yolk and Kahlua. Whisk until you get a chocolate mixture that is not very liquid, yet not hard.
4. Poor this chocolate filling or ganache in a cling wrap covered pan so you get at least a 1/2 inch (1.25cm) thick chocolate mixture
   
5. Put your ganache in the freezer (1/2 hour or so)

In case you want a chocolate coating like in the pictures…

You will give yourself extra work and personally, I prefer a simple cocoa powder coating. However, I give the steps below, so you will have a choice what kind of coating you prefer to add:

• 2 5/8 ounce (75 gr) of the same brown cooking chocolate
• 1 ounce (30 gr) real cocoa powder (no sugar added here!)
• butter as needed to make a chocolate paste (1/2 ounce (15 gr) in our case, depending on how much fat already is in the brown cooking chocolate)

1. Again in a warm water bath: melt the chocolate and add in the cocoa powder. Whisk together.
2. When the whole mixture becomes to dry, add in some butter and stir again.
3. Add more butter until you just get a paste.

How to coat the ganache

The easiest way to proceed is spooning a bit of ganache, rol it into a bal in your hands and swirl it around in a little round bowl filled with some cocoa powder: done!

However with room temperatures in Malaysia above 86 ºF (30 ºC), this is an easy workaround to work fast, so the ganache wont melt too much.

1. Take the ganache out of the freezer. Transfer the cling wrap with the ganache on a flat cutting board for easy cutting, and cut into squares like so:
   
2. Now take out one square of the ganache, put it in the melted coating mixture, turn around until are completely coated and put on another cling wrap.
3. Repeat this for each square of the ganache: chocolate truffles done!
4. When you have too much ganache, just coat the left-over squares with cocoa powder. When you have too much of the chocolate coating, start coating nuts or fruits with it…