Espresso Truffles

More truffles! Last time I made truffles, or rather the first time I made them, it was definitely a learning experience. I'd never really tried anything of this caliber before...I'd only ever really baked cookies and pies, stuff that was relatively easy. Before I made some chocolate orange truffles, and I was requested to make more. Although I'd already wanted to make more (and with a different fruit flavor), it was the end of the week and we were out of food! James suggested espresso truffles, and I thought it sounded great!

I decided to follow the same basic structure as the truffles I'd made previously: a creamy ganache covered with tempered chocolate. With this recipe, there are less ingredients...although you still have to make sure you really follow the directions.

Olive oil? What? Well, as I explain in my orange truffle post (and in the recipe itself!) to temper chocolate you have to follow an arduous process of heating the chocolate to a certain temperature, bringing it back down, bringing it back up, etc. Ugh. An easy way to imitate this process is to put a teaspoon of oil or so in the chocolate.

First thing is to heat and steam the cream. Essentially, I mixed some fresh espresso and some hot cream and then steamed them. Do NOT add the boiling espresso directly to the cream! You want them to be as close in temperature as possible so the milk doesn't burn or curdle. To steam I simply removed from heat and covered for about 30 minutes. The result is this:

As you can see, there's a bit of a skin. Don't worry about this! Just mix it back in when you reheat. Then you just add this to the chocolate you melted for the ganache and refrigerate until it's solid but malleable. Once that happens you can form it into balls (using cocoa powder to coat) and freeze until hard. Here is what the texture of my ganache was right after adding the cream and after refrigerating:

I had artificially tempered (and sweetened) the chocolate for the outer layer, and it was still sitting out in a bowl waiting for the ganache to set. This was 100% baker's chocolate, which meant it was thick and had no sweetness added at all. I've sweetened chocolate before, and it's pretty easy! You simply keep adding sugar and butter to the chocolate, stirring pretty constantly over heat, until it is to your desired taste. If it's sweet enough but too thick, add more butter or some water. When you add sugar, you add mass, and since the sugar doesn't melt immediately but rather stays in crystalline form, how much you add will really affect the texture. PS--you won't ever really melt all the sugar. It takes constant stirring for a long time to get it to melt down, but even if you still see some crystals don't fret. It won't affect anything but the texture.

When transferring your ganache balls to the freezer, simply place them all together in tight rows on the foil and fold around, as shown:

So now you have nice hard ganache centers ready to be dipped in your tempered chocolate! I brought my chocolate down to room temperature first, lest it start to melt the inner core before I could get them back in the fridge. Tip: To avoid your ganache centers from melting while you work on one or two at a time, simply leave them in the freezer! Just take out 2-3 at a time. To dip them, I used two forks. I put the center in the chocolate, flipped it around a bit, and then picked it up with forks to get rid of excess chocolate. Then put on a new baking sheet and put back in the fridge when you're done! Here is the amazingly delicious result!