Homemade Chocolate Truffles | Cook with Curtis Stone | Coles

Chocolate

truffles

. The name itself makes me smile. I'm going to show you how easy they are to make. You need a cup of heavy cream and 200 grams of

chocolate

. That's all. If you want to add a little liqueur, I have Chambord which gives it a lovely little flavor, but it's a totally optional extra. I'm going to add my cup of cream to a pan I just put on the stove. You want to warm this up. You want it to get right to the boil, but you don't want to boil it, and that's actually a very important part of this recipe.

Don't boil your cream. Because if you boil the cream, you will change its consistency and you don't want to do that when you're making

truffles

. Now I'm going to be a little naughty and add a little Chambord. Only a little. Just to flavor that cream. It has a beautiful blackberry flavor. And you can use anything. You can use Cointreau, which is a fantastic orange liqueur. You can make some rum. You know, any kind of flavors you like. So, you see, when the bubbles start to form, that's enough for me. So take that off. Don't forget: you will have some residual heat in the pan, so it will continue to work its magic.

Take your 200 grams of

chocolate

. Now I'm using small buttons. If you don't have buttons, then you can chop the chocolate and that's it. But make sure you cut it pretty small because you want this to happen. You want that beautiful melt to start happening almost instantly. Well, once this comes together into this beautiful chocolate sauce-like consistency, you want to take it out of the pan because, like I said, there's still a little bit of residual heat in there and you don't want that. So I just have a small plastic container. You can also use any type of glass container.

You can pour it directly onto your plate. You take this, you put it in the refrigerator, it will take a couple of hours to set and then you are ready to make your chocolate truffles. Take it out the next day. Make sure you have one of these guys waiting. It's a Parisian ball or a melon ball. I just put it in some hot water. And then what you do is you go straight to the chocolate and scoop out a good spoonful. And then hit it on a layup just like that. It's really simple. If you want to work faster, have two of these guys waiting, because while one is heating up, the other... ...is in use.

Now, if there is a trick to making them, it is to make them work quickly. So dip the melon ball into the chocolate, twist it, and then get it out of there as fast as you can. That way, the chocolate won't have time to heat up and become sticky. Okay, my truffles have been in the refrigerator for about 15 or 20 minutes. You can see that they have been set up again, which is what you want. Now I'm going to put on some gloves because this can get a little dirty. The first thing you should do is take a truffle like this and gently roll it between your hands until it is nice and round.

It doesn't have to be perfect. And then you basically just roll it in the cocoa that I've pre-sifted and then you pick it up and put it on a plate. Again, you simply take the truffle, with both hands, quickly roll it up, dip it in the cocoa and take it out. Now, I think these truffles are beautiful served as is. They are stored in an airtight container in the refrigerator. If you want to give them as gifts, you can find some cute paper serving containers like that. You can put them in a little box. They are great to bring along as a small hostess gift.

You know, there are so many different ideas here. So if you want to think about other edible gifts, just take a look.