Homemade Chocolate Truffles
This Valentine’s Day, give your sweetheart a special homemade treat by making chocolate truffles or cake pops! Both are delicious and can be decorated to match this season that celebrates love.
Cake Pops:
- Mix up and bake one of your favorite quick bread recipes. Once it has cooled, crumble it up with your hands and combine it with one cup of cream cheese frosting.
- Roll dough into small balls (less than an inch) and set on parchment paper and chill until they are firm. Here at the bed and breakfast, we melt the hardening chocolate in the microwave for 30 second intervals, stirring each time to make sure that it doesn’t burn. When there are no longer any lumps, we dip the chilled dough into the hardening chocolate with a fork, and place them back on the tray of parchment paper ‘til dry.
- You can decorate with sprinkles or drizzle with a different color of chocolate that compliments the first layer of the cake pop. Let the hardening chocolate set up and the cake pops are finished. These are my fiancé’s favorite snack!
Chocolate Truffles:
- For chocolate truffles, you will begin by making your ganache. Measure out 12 oz. of semi-sweet chocolate chips and place these in a bowl. Heat up one cup of cream on the stove, stirring until it begins to boil. As soon as it is hot, remove it from the heat and pour over your chocolate chips. Cover with plastic wrap for fifteen minutes.
- At this point, I like to begin melting my hardening chocolate. Pour approximately two cups of hardening chocolate into a double boiler and turn the heat setting on low. Stir often until the chocolate melts and there are no lumps. Remove from heat.
- When the fifteen minutes are up, whisk into your ganache a tablespoon of a liqueur of your choosing, or an extract of your favorite flavor. For the video blog provided below, we used almond extract. When this is mixed in, your ganache is finished. Cool before use.
- Ladle out hardening chocolate into clean, dry molds and tap bottom to make sure there are no bubbles. When each slot is full, dump remaining chocolate back into bowl. Scrape the surface of the mold to remove excess chocolate and set mold aside to harden. When it is ready, you will see a lip begin to form on chocolate mold. It is now ready for the ganache. Pipe the ganache into about halfway up to the top and then fill the remaining space with hardening chocolate. Scrape away excess.
Let truffles sit to harden, approximately 10 minutes, and enjoy!
*Do not let any ganache mix into the hardening chocolate as it will ruin and be unusable. Truffles will remain fresh approximately three months, if you can keep them that long!
Written by Kalli Edminsten
Steve and Kara Grant
Downtown Historic Bed &
Breakfasts of Albuquerque
Your Albuquerque New Mexico Bed
and Breakfasts Hosts
