Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Success!!!

I Am The Master Of The Universe King Of The Truffle...



Well, I finally forced myself to go back into the kitchen and open up the refrigerator and drag the Truffle guts I made yesterday out and try to do something with them.

The second batch, made with a combination of some really expensive raw chocolate (I forget the brand) and some unidentified grocery store crappy chunk stuff we had laying around, had set up rock hard yesterday when I put it in the fridge.

So I set everything out on the counter to come up to room temperature and after a couple of hours I discovered that the hard stuff was quite workable by hand, so I cut the 20 gram lumps down to 16 grams each and then made everything up in 16 gram balls and went to town rolling and covering and dipping.

Things went much better because I had been through the process already (I gave away all of yesterday's efforts to the waitresses and to the wives of some friends at one of our local watering holes), and after only about an hour of fooling around here's what I had in return for my efforts...



Being anal retentive a perfectionist at heart, I couldn't just settle for handing out exotic candy in a zip lock baggie or tin foil, so last year I bought a couple hundred little truffle boxes and here's a look at the packaging process.



And here's today's efforts all boxed up and ready to be delivered to my next set of victims...



BTW the KEY to making Truffles is temperature, Temperature, TEMPERATURE.

Temperature of EVERYTHING...the air, your pots, your pans, and most importantly your HANDS while handling them makes a HUGE difference in the outcome.

After today's effort I have a new little spring in my step because I think that with a little more practice I'll never buy a Truffle again.

Get to work guys and you can do it too on Valentines Day...(make Truffles, that is...and whatever else is up to you and your imagination...)

1 comment:

HEATHER said...

Yes, air temp is the MAJOR factor in all candy making!!! Humidity too! Even simple fudge will go wonky and be grainy if it's too humid.
Those truffles look delish!!