More Adventures in Chocolate (Truffles)!

For the perfect truffles, I sort of combined two recipes from two of my favorite Food Network chefs. I like this one from Tyler Florence because I like the idea of whipping up the filling to be creamy and smooth, and I like this one from Alton Brown because I like the idea of a Lindt Lindor truffle-like thing.

My truffles have only three ingredients, though. Great chocolate (70%+), cream, and some decaf espresso.

First, chop the chocolate finely. It has to be chopped because unlike with the chocolate cake, where the chocolate was melted over a double boiler, the chocolate is melted by just a little bit of hot cream:




Cream and espresso heating together. It's done here, when you have the little bubbles around the edge... don't want to burn it!



Pour cream/coffee mixture over finely chopped chocolate:



And stir til nice and smooth. This is pure ganache at its finest. Gimme a spoon!!!!



Per Tyler Florence's recipe, I mixed it for about a minute with a hand blender. You can see that it has lightened a little, grown a bit in volume, and has a really lovely glossy sheen



Pour mixture into saran wrap-lined plastic container and spread til relatively even. I go for tasty, not pretty, as you can see LOL:



After letting cool in the fridge at least 2 hours, I cut the ganache into squares. Here, you could take the time and mess to roll these into round balls, but uh, why? Or, at this point you could roll the truffles into anything you want - cocoa powder, chopped nuts, etc.



But I followed Alton Brown's recipe.... chopped more chocolate really finely again, this time I did melt it - VERY SLOWLY - over boiling water. as you can see in the finished truffles, they are fairly shiny and because I melted it so slowly and took care to make sure the chocolate never got too hot, they have a nice chocolate "snap" that they should have. Nah, they don't look perfect. But oh boy.... they taste it :)

Orange Grapefruit Granita

Looking for a different dessert alternative, I had some orange/grapefruit juice mix in the fridge (freshly squeezed, about 2/3 pink grapefruit, 1/3 valencia orange give or take), strained. Straining the juice apparently raises the glycemic index, but whatever. I did not add any sugar or sweetener whatsoever

Anyway, making granita is super easy. I just put the juice in a container and made sure it was super cold. As you can see, it's important that the container is a lot bigger than the liquid.

Put it in the freezer



Every hourish, take a fork and just drag it around the top, mixing it up well and getting rid of all the chunks, until it fluffs up and looks like this:



Scoop and serve. Done!

Flourless Sugarless Chocolate "Cake"

I took this recipe from a Montignac book I got from the library. I promptly returned the book without copying the recipe. d'ooohhhhhhh. You can find a good enough reproduction here though. What I basically did was halve the recipe and make it in individual pyrex bowls, for a more manageable portion size. It's really pretty tasty and I am all for recipes that have only 2 ingredients and really rely on the quality.

The key is of course the chocolate. This was 72% tastiness from Trader Joe's. When you can get 500 grams of it there (or Fresh & Easy) for $3.98, why eat anything else? :D


Melted over a double boiler on the stovetop:


I don't have anything of the eggs.... and I'm not sure why. Sorry about that LOL

So this is what they looked like, right before going into the oven (at a high heat for a short time)




And this is right after coming out of the oven - i mean right after - they are still puffy. That went down as they cooled.



After refrigerating for a few hours, I turned it out onto a plate and this is what it looks like. A fluffy yet dense and rich cakelike dessert delicacy.



Melt some chocolate for a ganache and spread it on top and bam, delicious low-glycemic dessert with no added sugar besides what's in the dark chocolate. And man, really tasty.

I'm falling way behind...

Oh dear. Well, i haven't been lazy with my cooking, but i've been lazy with the blogging. I have so much stuff. Some good, some not so good, HAHAHA. Been playing with chocolate and chicken a fair bit. So I'll try like hell to catch up in the next couple weeks!