Chocolate Truffles & Sugar High Friday!

For the latest Sugar High Friday the theme is truffles & the host is The Passionate Cook. Now I love truffles yet have never made them before so I thought I would start at the beginning & make some traditional French style truffles from Green & Black’s Chocolate Cook book. These are predominantly a chocolate ganache, dusted with cocoa powder. Apparently they were first called truffles as they looked like real freshly dug truffles of the fungus type! They are absolutely wickedly delicious, dense & rich in a very adult dark chocolatey way that I love and I feel even more guilty eating these as opposed to bought ones as I know exactly what went into them. Not too time consuming though you do have to start at least 3 hours or so before hand to get the required amount of refrigeration time. Also today in Melbourne it’s quite hot, up there in the 30’s, so I found I had to roll them in batches as the mixture started getting a bit melty after about 10 truffles, so I popped the mix batch in the fridge every now & then. Yum, now I have to try & give some away before I eat them all.

Micah’s Truffles

275g dark chocolate, minimum 60% cocoa solids, broken into pieces
250ml double cream
50g unsalted butter, at room temperature
50g cocoa powder

Place the chocolate in a large bowl. Bring the cream to the boil & pur it over the chocolate. Stir gently until the chocolate has melted, trying not to create bubbles. Leave to cool for 2 minutes, then add the butter in 2 stages & stir in gently. Once the butter is incorporated, the ganache should be smooth & glossy with no oil slick on the surface. Set the mix in the fridge for a minimum of 3 hours or overnight.

Remove from the fridge about 15 minutes before you want to make the truffles, depending on room temperature. Put the cocoa into a bowl. Ensure your hands are cold & dry, then dust them with cocoa. Take teaspoonfuls of the ganache mix & roll the mixture in to a ball in your cocoa dusted hands. Drop each truffle in the bowl of cocoa, roll it around then toss between your palms to remove any excess powder. The truffles can then be returned to the fridge and kept for up to 2 days as long as they are stored in an airtight container. Serve straight from the fridge or at room temperature.

Chocolate Espresso Cookies Friday 10th Feb 2006

Tomorrow I have friends arriving from Brisbane & we’re all off to visit Jane in hospital so I thought it would be nice to make a little treat to take along. I pinched this recipe from Lex Culinaria. As you can see from the photo mine look nothing like her gorgeous batch, a lot flatter, maybe I shouldn’t have squashed them so much. However as promised they are a delightful little treat. I don’t like things that are too rich & sweet so the dark chocolate & coffee mixture really appealed to me. Heres the recipe straight from Lex…

Chocolate Espresso Cookies

225 grams bitter-sweet (semi-sweet) dark chocolate
50 grams (about 2 tablespoons) butter
1 egg, plus two egg whites
50 grams brown sugar
50 grams white sugar
30 ml crazy strong coffee
100 grams almond meal
60 grams flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

Melt chocolate and butter in the top of a double boiler over medium heat. Whip eggs and sugar on high speed until pale and frothy, about 10 minutes. Stir chocolate mixture into egg mixture. Stir in coffee. Sift almonds, salt, flour and cinnamon together and mix into wet ingredients. Don't worry if your batter looks too runny to be cookie dough, it's supposed to look that way. Pour batter into a shallow plastic pan (one of those black plastic glad bake pans works well) and refrigerate for 3 or 4 hours, until the dough is chilled and firm. Roll dough into balls the size of a hard-boiled egg yolk. Dip each ball in sugar and then squash them flattish with the bottom of a glass or mug. If you'd rather not get your hands all sticky, you could roll the dough into a log, coat the log in sugar and slice cookie rounds from the log instead of making the balls. This should make 35 or 40 small cookies. Each cookie will run you about 70 Calories and 3 grams of fat.
You could reduce the fat and calorie count even more by using more flour and less almond meal and by substituting cocoa powder for some of the chocolate. Just remember to add a bit more sugar if you do that, as the semi-sweet chocolate has sugar in it that cocoa does not.
Bake in a 325F oven for 12 minutes.