Making Truffles

Many years ago, if memory serves me right, my mother-in-law sent me a link to an easy truffle recipe. My oldest kids were pretty young at the time, so this may have been eight or ten years ago. I've used that recipe for years to intermittently make simple chocolate truffles. My two favorite flavors are orange cardamom and mocha. Both are a simple matter of simmering flavorings in the cream, the former using decorticated cardamom and fresh or dried orange peel, and the latter using ground decaf coffee.

I used that recipe for years. For a long time, I could Google for "easy truffle recipe," and there it was. A few years ago, it became a little harder to find, as more and more similar pages and videos showed up in my search results. At this point, I think the original page is simply gone. I could never remember who hosted it; I would recognize it by the prose, layout, and images.

It's really not that complicated, though, and I realize the main thing I needed the recipe for was ratio between cream and chocolate. Last night's searching resulted in my reading more about this ratio. Hungry Happenings has a good explanation, and I'll just summarize here, for my future recollection, this idea:

2:1 Chocolate to Cream Ratio

That's really all I need to know. My old recipe used volumetric measurements of cream and weight measurements of chocolate, which made it harder to remember. The weight ratio is much easier to remember as well as being easy to execute with the kitchen scale.

How do I do it? Heat up the cream, but don't let it boil. Put flavorings in. If they need to simmer, let them simmer for 10-20 minutes. Weigh chocolate chips into a measuring cup. (Yes, the fancy people say not to use chocolate chips, but you know what? It's easy. My truffles are not silky smooth, but I don't mind a rustic truffle.) Pour the cream over the chips and stir it up to make the ganache. Pour it into a broad, flat container, and put this in the freezer for 20-30 minutes to cool. Prep some kind of toppings, like cocoa powder or chopped nuts. Gather children with nominally clean hands. Use a little spoon or scooper to portion out roundish blobs of chocolate, drop into the topping bowls, and let the kids roll them around to coat. Family fun!

Last night, the younger boys and I made a batch for my wife's birthday week. We made a wonderful discovery. One of the recipes I found suggested trying vanilla or almond extract as a flavoring agent, so I looked around the baking supplies. I came across something I don't remember seeing before: a flavoring called fiori di Sicilia. We popped off the top to check it out, and we were wowed by the wonder smell. We put a teaspoon into our 4 oz. of cream. For toppings, we used cocoa powder and crushed pecans. They turned out amazing. The fiori di Sicilia gives a complex citrus flavor, just the right amount for chocolate.

So there you go. It's all story and only an implicit recipe, but I do feel like I leveled up in my trufflemaking last night. No longer bound to an arcane combination of cups and ounces, nor to others' recommendations for flavorings, I am now free to truffle away.