[Sca-cooks] Favorite chocolate truffle recipe?

[Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Anne-Marie Rousseau:
>Great info, Adamantius, thanks!
>Like I said, this is the first year I made truffles...and I cant believe
>I haven't made them before. I find baking cookies incredibly boring and
>frustrating (all that scooping and baking in batches. Argh! Bar cookies
>are better, I hardly ever do rolled cookies anymore.). at least with
>truffles you mix 'em up (about the same amt of time it takes to cream
>butter and sugar and fold in the dry ingredients) and chill the goo for
>a few hours. You then make the truffles, and it takes the same amt of
>time to scoop up truffle goo as it does to scoop up cookie goo, but then
>you don't have to wait to bake them. Woohoo! :)

They also keep a lot better in their unscooped form, so you can make 
a batch and fridgerize them, then scoop and dust them out as per 
need, shortly before serving them, or putting them in a candy box in 
those little paper cups.

>And yes, we have salmon here. But you should warn Said Spawn that we
>also tend to put people to work if they hang around too much ;).
>(Nintendo is hiring last I heard ;))

Work, per se, is not a problem, as long as you hang a fish on a 
string and stick well out of his reach...

>mmmm....kirsch/cherry bit truffles....toasty hazelnut bits with
>frangelico...I like the idea of the edible gold dust...

Well, I just happened to have it around. I thought it might be 
interesting. On the cherry front, y'ever had those dried Montmorency 
or Morello cherries? They sound like they'd rule.

>any hints on making them nice and round other than rolling in your
>hands?

I use a melon baller ("Uh oh! That's Johnny Ringo's girl!" <sorry, 
couldn't help it; that's the punch line of a really bad -- and quite 
obscene -- joke>.) It's been a long time since I called that anything 
other than a Parisienne Knife, but then outside the U.S. they seem to 
be used most often on potatoes. Some recipes advise piping them into 
little rounds, but life is too short. You can also probably find a 
very small ice cream scoop, the kind with the trigger that pushes the 
goop off the scoop. I have one that's just slightly too big, maybe 1 
1/2 inches, that I use for meatballs and filling dumplings, but I bet 
there's a smaller size out there that would be ideal, with a 3/4 or 
1-inch diameter. Ultimately, though, I think it may be 
counter-productive to try to get them too perfect. If I were shipping 
them long distances I'd get them as smooth as possible in whatever 
shape I wanted them in, and then coat them with couverture chocolate, 
but the appeal of truffles in France seems to be a certain home-made 
irregularity: after all, they're supposed to look like truffles, 
aren't they? I think if they were a big commercial confectionery item 
(yeah, I know, they are, but the real McCoy is homemade or served as 
a petit-four in fine restaurants, rolled shortly before you eat them) 
it would be different. So I suspect they're supposed, ideally, to 
have a certain rustic, rough-hewn look to them.

What I did not know until recently is that chocolate truffles are a 
common Christmas gift in France. These people are civilized, at least 
in that respect! But then, I also like real fruitcake...

>  And thanks for the tip on the limitation of oxidation with the
>parchment/plastic wrap.
>
>--Anne-Marie, who wishes she had more time to play in the kitchen :)

That's my holiday wish for all of us: may we have more time to do the 
things we want to, and need less time to do the things we don't want 
to.

Adamantius