truffles recipe ::yum, yum, yum::

My truffles recipe is often requested. I sort of made it up myself from a bunch of different recipes I found online and have never typed it up, so it hasn't been very sharable. That changes right now. :)

Ganache ingredients:
1 bag of semisweet chocolate chips
2 Tbsp heavy whipping cream
4 Tbsp butter
4 Tbsp rum (or other flavoring, optional)

Coating ingredients:
1 package of chocolate bark coating

Day One
Melt chips and butter in a double boiler with the cream.

You could also melt it in the microwave, but I like using the double boiler.

It looks gross before it's melted

After the mixture has melted completely, add rum (or other flavoring, like a tsp of vanilla or a shot of espresso), and mix it in well. If you aren't adding extra flavor, you're already done with this part!

If your flavoring makes the mixture too thin (we're going for a consistency similar to pudding) add 1/2 cup of cocoa and 1 Tbsp of powdered sugar.

Perfect.

Transfer your mixture into a bowl and chill overnight. [I'm imagining that now is when I would pour it into candy molds, freeze overnight, and move on to day three. This is the epiphany I had last night when I was sick of rolling balls of ganache.]

Day Two

Scoop out the ganache and roll it into balls. Put them on a cookie sheet and freeze them overnight. You may leave them on the cookie sheet until day three, but I usually transfer them to a bowl once they're not so sticky. If your ganache is fairly hard, you can just put it back in the fridge. The perfect texture is so soft that, if it's not frozen, it melts too much when dipped in the coating on day three.

It's a messy job.

I made a plain dark chocolate ganache. Without the extra liquid in the mixture, it was very hard. I couldn't roll it after it had chilled overnight. I tried letting it sit out for an hour or so, but it still didn't soften enough. So, I chopped it up with a knife and made irregular shaped pieces.

The rum mixture was the perfect texture.

Day Three

Melt the coating.

Again, you could use a double boiler or the microwave.

Take a few (I usually go with about 2 dozen) pieces of ganache out of the freezer at a time to dip them in the melted coating. I find that if I take out more than 2 dozen at once, they start melting in the coating by the time I get to the last ones, and that makes a big mess. After dipping, lay them out on wax paper. Leave them plain or garnish with powdered sugar, cocoa, a different color of bark coating, finely chopped nuts, coconut, or whatever you may dream up.

There they are! I made three batches, which turned out to be 203 truffles, even though I made half of them way too big. ::whew::