Chocolate Truffle Recipe

Today we're making brandied chocolate truffles four different ways. All of them are delicious and there is so much chocolate and alcohol in this. You will literally say, thank you, John. I love this recipe. Making this again. Let's get started. To make this recipe, I'm using 12 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate chips. Now, if you wanted to go extra fancy, find a beautiful dark chocolate that you love, just chop it up roughly and put it in that bowl. Same deal, but this will be even more indulgent, but also even more expensive. So trade-offs. Okay, into the bowl. And now three tablespoons of unsalted butter. You could use salted butter if you want to. I'll actually be adding in some salt just to taste for this recipe. This is now gonna go over a double boiler or a bain-marie. So you wanna have gently simmering water that's not anywhere near this bowl. It's steaming it, steaming the bowl gently to melt the chocolate. You don't wanna heat it up too much because the chocolate will seize and become crunchy and it's not nearly as nice. Okay, here we go. Notice the water is gently simmering. It's not at a full boil. Place the bowl over, and you can break the butter up if you want to. This will begin melting in no time. So just keep an eye on it. You could technically walk away, but just be with the chocolate and the butter. Mix it around a little bit, or just walk away and come back. It'll be fine. While our chocolate's melting, I'm gonna chop some pecans up. So just give them a nice chop. We're gonna have little pieces that we'll roll our truffles or bonbons in. These are gonna be delicious. Of the three flavors, we're doing cocoa powder, toasted coconut, and then toasted pecans. I thought coconut was gonna be my favorite because I love coconut and everything, but it was the pecans. I was shocked. Well, mildly surprised. How about that? Finely chop in those nuts. It's not a rough chop. It's a fine chop. Huh, okay. All we have to do is dump this out onto a baking tray. Spread it out. And bake for like five minutes at 350. Then just move it around, not with your fingers, because the outside is gonna toast first. So we want an even, nice, beautiful toast, and keep an eye on it. You don't want it to blacken. They'll get bitter. All right, back to our chocolate. It's melting up. It looks a little crunky right now because the butter is in pools, but we can whisk it together. It'll be beautiful. It's almost there. I'm also gonna toast some coconut flakes. You can use sweetened if you want. You could use unsweetened too. I feel like the sweetened is a better choice. Spread it out. You don't need that much. Same deal. You wanna mix it up halfway through because the outside is definitely gonna brown first. So take it out, into there. My chocolate's pretty melty. I'm taking it off the heat so we can go over this face to face. And we're gonna pour in about a quarter cup of cream. You can use a little bit less. This is a quarter cup. I'm gonna use a little bit less. Take a reserved teaspoon. So give that a whisk. You can put it back over the heat if you want right now, but the chocolate's pretty warm and it's going to be really weird looking and then beautiful and silky in a moment. So see, look at that. It's coming together. So right now we basically have a chocolate ganache and that's delicious, but it's the holiday. So what can you do? Well, you could take a quarter cup of brandy and put that in there. That's delicious. You could add some Cointreau, Grand Marnier. Those are nice orange liqueurs. You could do some Amaretto. You could also add in toasted nuts into here directly. Toasted coconut into here. You could add little chopped bits of candied cherries. Okay, look, first of all, whoa. This is like my kind of soup over here. This is nice, beautiful, and silky right now. Pure decadence. And I actually want to add in just a little bit of contrast. So we're going to add some flaked sea salt in. I'm taking a nice, generous pinch of salt. And you know, that could be anywhere from a quarter teaspoon to like half a teaspoon. Take a look at this stuff. It's called Maldon sea salt. This is not an ad, but this stuff, if you're ever wondering like, what do all those Instagrammers use to like, you know, make their stuff look nice and sexy. It, look at this salt. This is like, what? This is a giant piece of salt. Totally going to get wasted since it'll melt in the chocolate, but I wanted to share it with you. So let's toss that in there. Now, give it a mix. You could add some more brandy in here, by the way. I feel like that was a stingy quarter cup, so. A little extra blessing over there. So mix it up. This has like the most insane consistency. Let's see if I can show it to you. Do you see that drizzle? And you can just smell the alcohol coming off of it. Which is how a brandied truffle should be. All right, let's just clean the edge up. This is for me for snacking. This is gonna chill in the fridge for at least two hours. You need it to firm up completely. You can make this a day ahead. Just leave it in the fridge, cover it up, and you will be golden, okay? This is gonna get messy. I'm just warning you. You can wear gloves for the next step. I'll be right back. We have some nice golden coconut here. Delicious. I will not be snacking on it. It needs to come to a room temperature. We also have our delicious toasted pecans. Also needs to be at room temperature. So set it aside. You could transfer it to a bowl and pop it into the fridge too, if you'd like. One minute later, but with a swap out from the night before, I have my chilled batch of chocolate truffle mixture. What am I gonna do with it? Well, scoop it out. You can use an ice cream scoop with this little release. You want the small one, or you try using a tablespoon or a teaspoon too. The size is totally up to you. I think they should be just a bit smaller than this in diameter, and you'll roll it up, and it'll be a little bit tinier. Perfect one or two bites. Oh, this chocolate mixture is everything. All right, here is our little tablespoon or two teaspoons. This is where it gets messy. So I'm gonna do one, and then we'll do some magical cut twos. Here we go. One ball onto here. Basically, you're gonna roll these up, and it's gonna go into the fridge to chill again, because you want them to firm up and be non-melty when you handle them. Trust me. Number two. There we go. So elegant. Should be an athlete. Okay. I'm basically gonna scoop out as much as I can, then roll it all together and pop it all in the fridge. That way, I don't have to wash my hands every five seconds. If you love raspberries, you could also buy some dehydrated raspberries. They sell them at Trader Joe's, among other places. Then pop those into your blender with a little bit of confectioner's sugar. Make it into a beautiful, deep pink, soft red powder. Roll the truffles out in that. Now. Okay. That was easy. You could also weight these out on a scale. You'll have exactly uniform truffles, but I don't know if you wanna do that. I don't. Not today. They begin melting immediately, and I have cold, deathly ice hands. So you might have to work really carefully, or chill them, put them in the freezer. But they can melt. It's gonna be fine. And no one says they have to look like perfect spheres. Let's work quick. These look like chocolate pebbles. Just not what I was going for. So my advice to you, if you want yours to look a little bit more perfect, but you're rolling them by hand, is to give them a rough out right now, like I'm doing, pop them into the fridge or freezer, and then do a second pass. So that second pass will really smooth them out. But when you roll things in your cocoa powder or your nuts, then it will also kind of smooth things out a bit too. So you won't notice. If I haven't mentioned this earlier, you could have used gloves, but to be honest, I don't know why, the idea of rolling gloves, this grossed me out. I couldn't handle it. I was like, I'll do it by hand. I'll wash my hands. It'll be okay. Using my clean hands, I'm going to be transferring these little guys into the fridge. Just let them firm up for a minute. We'll come back. In the meantime, I wanna have a little taste test because this is like really delicious. So good. That brandy, loving you is wrong. I don't wanna be right. It is so good. And you are getting a lot of alcohol in there because none of it burnt off. So not for kids. You can make a virgin one for the kids with just like cream, chocolate. You can add some nuts in to make it more interesting, but you can totally just, you know, pour in the alcohol for the one that you're eating because it's delicious. It's basically eating icing. Let's roll icing into a ball and call it a truffle. Perfect. So classy. My truffles cooled down just enough so I can handle them now without getting crazy looking fingers. And we're gonna dip them in our various coatings. I'm so excited and we're done. That's it. It's such an easy recipe. All right, so first off, let's do our toasted coconut. Let's roll it in there. It'll pick up that coconut right away, but you could press it down too. Yeah, I remember now. The toasted coconut is like the least adherent one. One down. Looks pretty nice. Now let's do my favorite, the toasted pecans. So just roll it around in there. It'll pick up those pecan pieces, but you could press them in and sprinkle them over too. The more pecans, the better. This is like, this is so good. If you're like John, I only have time to make one coating, toasted pecans. There we go. You could also just give this a minute, like let it come back to room temperature a bit, just a little bit. So it'll be stickier on the outside and everything will coat it more easily. My tip to you. Okay, next we have our cocoa. Covered in chocolate, that's surprising. So for the cocoa powder, that'll really stick on very easily. Just give it a little roll. Gingerly take it out. Transferring all these to like a little baking tray, just so I can pop them back into the fridge before I photograph them. So like I said earlier, you could just kind of manipulate these a bit and round them off once you have them all covered in nuts and things that aren't sticky. It's so much easier. And if you see any blank spots and you care, you can just stick in a few nuts or coconut flakes or whatever you're using. Okay, transfer over and we're almost done. The pecans and the toasted coconut look pretty similar, but I want them to be like nice and like, you know, have some variety, even though they all almost taste the same. So I'm gonna try this in just a little bit of powdered sugar and see how that looks. It'll either be wonderful or disappointing. Roll that around. Pretty good. It's a snowball. We're all done. I'm so excited. This is gonna be delicious, but I'll take a bite with the pecans for you. This is my favorite. Although the other ones are pretty good too. Should you always add brandy to chocolate? Yes, a thousand times yes. So good. Oh my gosh. None of it evaporated. It's all in there. So the chocolate's nice and soft and the crunch of the pecans, so toasty. Nice depth of flavor. And that little bit of salt made a huge difference. All right. Thanks so much for watching. If you have any comments, questions, leave them below and hit that like button and subscribe.