Truffles

I wondered how people ever found new things to do before the advent of Living Social and GroupOn.  Brilliant ideas to be sure, in fact, wish I would have thought of it.

Sometime in January I bought, as did ChickenLady, a truffle making class.  I have 21 new things to do and this would be one of the new things.  Last night was said class.

It took me longer to find this place than it should have, but it turns out Dawn's Candies is a small shop that's inside a large party center type shop. They have the whole set up and the heavy lifting done for you.

Blueberry, ChickenLady and I took our seats in the back as Dawn began by explaining the chemistry of chocolate tempering. I had no idea that chocolate had "crystals" that wanted to be separate then together and depending on the temperature of the chocolate will stay together or not. Fascinating stuff. As Dawn went over and over the complexity of tempering chocolate I was struggling to keep up and then realized we wouldn't be tested. Phew!  And that Dawn and her little elves had done all the tempering etc for us.

They handed us these little trays of "pre" molded chocolate molds.  These little molds needed to be filled and then coated.  She left us with a VAT of chocolate ganache - it took every ounce of my being to not just stick a spoon into the VAT O'Chocolate. She showed us how to flavor the ganache and left us to our imagination.

Blueberry shot right out of the gate by mixing peanut butter with caramel.  You'd think the two wouldn't do so well together...but it turns out it was over the top fantastic. 

My first flavor was hazelnut.  I love the smell and flavor of hazelnut. And mixing it with chocolate meant these little gems of goodness would taste a lot like Nutella.  I should have made more hazelnut.

My other flavor combination weren't overly exotic or interesting, but good all the same.  Between the three of us we made orange, amaretto, Kirsch cherry, Tequila/lime/salt combo, Malibu Rum, lemon, raspberry, and coffee! I think that's all of them. We could have chosen from so many other flavors and the combinations were endless.

After we filled our truffles, it was on to sealing them and dipping them.  The sealing them was as easy as swiping over the flat bottom with a finger full of chocolate. Once that was done, it was on to dipping.

They had these nifty forks for dipping.  Blueberry and ChickenLady were doing mostly dark chocolate, where I was all about the milk chocolate.  We had to "temper" our milk chocolate though. They little elves heated it up and at a certain temp, them dumped in these HUGE chunks of chocolate. The heat helped melt part of the bricks of chocolate.  Once the milk chocolate was at the right temp, we pulled out the chocolate chunks and began dipping.

 

After dipping each flavor, and before the chocolate dried, we could decorate the top with misc colored sugars and other things like coffee beans.

In the end, I have 35 beautifully decorated truffles. And someday soon I'll come down off this sugar high. ChickenLady may or may not.