Chocolate Whiskey Truffles by Paul A. Young

Hi guys and girls. We're now going to make one of my favourite things which is filled chocolate. So using a mould, we are going to use one of my favourite ingredients. And you need tempered chocolate, a professional mould. Don't use silicon moulds, they're too bendy and flimsy. These are about 15 quid each. Lots of websites and shops sell these. And you're going to need our water ganache. So we're going to turn that into whiskey ganache later on. So you've got your ganache ready, your tempered chocolate ready. Take your mould, you know how to look after these and you know how to keep them clean. Place it on your workbench and we're going to pour the tempered chocolate into each of the cavities. So tempered chocolate in the bowl and we're going to fill the whole mould with your chocolate quite quickly so it doesn't get too thick. Because the thicker the chocolate, the thicker the shell. Give it a tap and then scrape off the excess chocolate off the top. So scrape this off. Scrape this off. Give it a good tap to get the air bubbles out. Noise a bit. Noise a bit over. Then turn this upside down and tap the edge with your scraper so the chocolate pours out. Scrape the bottom. Scrape again. Keep it upside down all the time. Tap again and scrape. So it looks like this. You've got a lining of chocolate, a shell of chocolate. Place this upside down onto some parchment greaseproof paper. Leave that there for five minutes so that the chocolate can drop down, hit the surface of the paper and create a flat lip. Now while that's doing that we're going to turn our water ganache into whiskey ganache. So this is our classic water ganache recipe. You can add any booze you like but I love whiskey a lot. And it works brilliant with chocolate and I'm not shy with the whiskey. This is one of my favourites, Glenmarie Chardonnay Cask. I'm going to put two doubles so it's quite strong. Two doubles. One. Oh look and a little bit for me for later. Not much left. Stir that in. I don't like flavoured truffles. I hate it when there's just a little dash of rum, a little dash of whiskey, a little dash of cognac. I like it to have a really really good strong flavour especially if you're using really good whiskey. It should taste, your finished chocolate should taste like the whiskey. So all you do with a spatula is mix that in. It dilutes the ganache a little bit, makes it thinner and silkier but gives it a really strong flavour. We should give it a little taste. Spot on. That's lovely. You get the flavour of the chocolate which is clean and crisp and smooth but you get that finish of intense whiskey and the Chardonnay Cask finish on this whiskey gives it a really delicate fragrant but with a kick finish and now we can lift up our mould. So hold the paper. I'm going to lift it up and then take my scraper across the top and press down quite firmly so you see all these little bits of chocolate coming up. That's exactly what you want and it leaves this flat edge. So you've got these flat edges around each chocolate. That's what our base is going to stick to. So that goes in the fridge for about 10 minutes. 10 minutes is up so grab your mould out the fridge. Don't tip it up or all the shells will fall out. Place it flat on the bench and we need to get our ganache into a piping bag. So this is our lovely whiskey ganache, still slightly liquid. Pour it into a jug. This is just to make it a lot easier to handle and I've made a piping bag with greaseproof paper. You can easily buy ready-made piping bags. I'm a bit old-fashioned. I love to make piping bags. Very sad I know but sit down, watch film, make hundreds of these. We'll not talk about that. Fill your piping bag, seal the end over and just cut a small amount off the bottom. Hold it this way up otherwise everything will fall out. There we go. Then we're going to fill each shell just a couple of millimetres underneath the top and I'm going to pinch the top like that to stop it coming out and then let go and fill and stop. So squeeze, squeeze my thumb and finger to make it stop. Work all the way along. Come up as far as you dare, not right to the top because we need to get a base on to cap them off to seal them in. So fill the last one, just go over them if they're not quite full enough, using that last little bit of ganache out of the piping bag. Have a look at the mould, make sure that nothing is above. You hold up the top of the mould, give it a tap, get the air bubble out and you can either, two things you can do. One is leave this overnight to crust over. Crusting is when the top of the ganache sets, sets all the way through so you can put chocolate on top or pop it back in the fridge for 10 minutes. 10 minutes is up so our ganache should be set. Let's have a look. So if you tip the mould up, if the ganache does not move then it's set, you can cap off. So this process is about sealing the ganache inside the chocolate, makes the chocolate last longer and with whiskey you get about a month shelf life on this finished chocolate because the alcohol preserves it and it also seals the ganache in so that you've got this lovely finished crisp shell on the outside. So what we do, hold the mould really steady and we're going to spread tempered chocolate, so remember every time it needs to be tempered chocolate, across the bottom of the mould. Now it's the top at the minute but when we turn the chocolate out it'll become the bottom. So we spread chocolate, you can take your time with this, spread it across, filling each cavity making sure there are no air bubbles and then we're going to scrape off the excess chocolate with our scraper, starting at one end, along and along. Now do not be tempted to go over it again and again and again because you'll get a lumpy bottom and a sign of a fantastic chocolate is this, a really shiny smooth bottom on the chocolate. Now we're going to speed that setting up so the bottom sets just two or three minutes back in the fridge. Your chocolates are now ready but we need to turn them out so I'll just clean my little bench down and I'm going to do a little twist, it won't crack as much this time and hopefully we can look underneath if this looks like this silvery and not dark brown they've released. So we're going to turn them out and we're going to turn them out onto something soft again so I'll grab my nice clean tea towel, I'm going to turn it upside down and give it a tap and lift and tap and lift. Oh there's one more and they should completely come out clean and then what you're left with are these beautiful chocolates which we need to present on this beautiful big tray. Now I'm going to do some quality control because there are always a few that don't work so anything like this where there is a air bubble in the chocolate on the surface, there are a few here, they go in my mouth to try if they're nice. The rest go on the tray, there's a lot of whiskey in there, it's good. Air bubbles, air bubbles, quality control is important. There we go, filled chocolate, beautiful shiny, eat at room temperature, don't store them in the fridge, they will last a month in airtight container. Remember subscribe to my channel for more exciting recipes like this. Enjoy making chocolates, I'm having my second.