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 :)