How To Improvise Truffles.
As a relatively new cook, I’m a bit unorthodox. I rarely follow recipes and when I do, I always add a little pinch or splash of something extra.
One thing that I never follow recipes for has always been Chocolates. Truffles, Bonbons, cream filled chocolates, no matter how much I know I should follow a recipe, I never can keep myself on track. For the last two years I’ve made an assorted box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day and each time the candies were my own special concoctions. I always want to blog about my favorite chocolates but then I find I never can because I make the candies by feel, not by measurement. Finally, I’ve decided to write a post about how to improvise your own truffles instead and just give the basic idea of the ones I made this year.
What you need:
- Organic Butter
- Powdered Sugar (Hopefully homemade but no judgment if you chose to use the store bought, I know I have!)
- Milk or Non-Dairy Milk
- Flavorings
Basic Cream Truffles
For a basic cream truffle or chocolate, you can make either a classic ganache or a simple butter cream. I prefer butter creams because you can’t make any flavor other then chocolate with a ganache. With butter cream you can flavor it any way imaginable.
Mix up a batch of butter cream. When the butter cream is finished, chill until hard but not frozen.
Then scoop out rounded teaspoon sized truffles and roll into smooth balls. When you’ve made them into balls, pop them into the freezer until completely frozen.
Once the truffles are frozen, they become much easier to handle. This way you can coat or drizzle them in chocolate or even make an outer layer!
For my butter cream, I made a mild mocha cream. It was simply butter, powdered sugar, salt, milk, and coffee extract. After my butter cream balls were frozen, I mixed up a batch of no bake brownies. If you want to replicate this, try to find a recipe on the dry side or just add more cocoa. You can also make a cookie truffle batch and use that as your second layer. I then pressed out a bit of the no bake brownie and smoothed it over my butter cream until it made a complete protective shell. Viola! Mocha Cream Filled Brownie Bites.
Liquid Filled Chocolates
If you want to make a liquid filled chocolate all you have to do is make or buy a sweet filling and pour it into hard chocolate coated rubber molds. Last year I made raspberry cream filled chocolates. The filling was simply a soft cream with a little thickener and my favorite raspberry jam.
Just melt chocolate ,spread it into your rubber mold, or even onto mini cupcake wrappers (carefully).
Once that chocolate hardens in the refrigerator or freezer, you can fill it with whatever liquid or cream filling you want.
The wetter the filling is, the thicker you need your chocolate shell to be or you risk the chocolates leaking.
Cookie Truffles
First off, make a basic butter cream. Flavor it however you like. Now mix in milk and flour, preferably softer flour (ex. I used whole wheat pastry flour) until you get a ball of dough that sticks together but doesn’t crumble. If you want the texture to be more like a short bread, use a larger butter to powdered sugar ratio and let the dough get to the crumbling stage when you add flour. It may be more messy to eat but the texture is exactly like shortbread.
You can make brownie truffles by subbing cocoa powder for some of the flour or oatmeal truffles by using oat flour and rolled oats in your dough instead of other flours.
This year I made all cookie truffles. If your butter cream comes out too soft to serve on it’s own, you can mix in flour and flavorings and make a large batch of cookie truffles. It’s the perfect way to save a ruined batch. For my cookie truffles this year I made:
White Chocolate Coconut Pecan Shortbread
Mocha Cream Filled Brownie Bites Brown
Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Balls with Cocoa Nibs and
Sugar Oatmeal Cookie Truffles
I hope this post can give you a few ideas on how to invent your own truffles. Good luck!
loavesandkisses 