Valentine’s Day is coming up and if you’re poor like me, homemade chocolate truffles are totally the way to go. Truffles make for a fantastic gift, a sweet finish to a romantic meal, or perhaps just a friendly distraction from an otherwise lonely holiday. Whatever your circumstance, truffles are a decadent treat and great way to enjoy all the deep flavors and dark nuances a quality chocolate has to offer.
Nowadays you can get a chocolate bar that’s been joined with all sorts
of funky ingredients. Lavender, ginger, salt, or my personal favorite,
bacon. Local chocolate company Theo, in my humble opinion, performs these marriages better than anyone.
The trick to infusing chocolate with complementing ingredients seems to be in remembering who the star of the show is. Chocolate can be a real diva. It must be the prominent flavor, or else all is lost.
For this recipe we take it old school, around 800 years old school to be sure, and infuse hot peppers with chocolate the way Aztecs used to do. The result is pure chocolate indulgence with a little spice somewhere in the background. And according to ancient Aztec ideograms, it was very sexy.
Now, making truffles at home is far easier than you may think. A basic chocolate ganache is straightforward and by definition truffles are supposed to be imperfect (looking like a black truffle just pulled off the forest floor).
Of course, having a mother-in-law who is a chocolatier also helps. In fact, everything I know about sweets can be credited to Jytte Tuttle, who also runs an informal cooking school, Spice of Life. So, if you find this exercise to be a real yawner and want to pull sugar into orchids, make butter cream into ornate lace, or dazzle everyone with bon bons that make Godiva chocolate look like they belong inside a piñata, then I would encourage you to attend a class of all levels or even arrange a specialized one with friends.
1 lbs bitter sweet chocolate – I like Seattle’s
Dilettante Chocolate for my baking needs
1 teaspoon adobo sauce from canned chipotle peppers
5 grates of fresh nutmeg
5 grates of fresh cinnamon
1 cup of heavy whipping cream
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
¼ cup cocoa powder
1 tablespoon dark chili powder for garnish
*Special Equipment: A rasp or cheese grater to grate fresh spices
Preparation
Bring cream to simmer in heavy small saucepan, without scalding it. Add in adobo sauce and let it steep for about a minute. Remove from heat and strain into a metal bowl with a fine sieve, removing any particulates. Cool to lukewarm, 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, mix chocolate, butter, and spices together in a separate metal bowl. Add in cream and allow the chocolate to melt on its own without stirring, about 5 minutes. With a wooden spoon positioned dead center of the bowl, slowly stir the mixture in small circles, work your way out to the rim and repeat. Eventually the mixture will pull into a silky, high gloss ganache.
Cover the ganache with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature (away from any heat) for 90 minutes, until it is a solid mass. Once hardened, extract clumps of chocolate from the bowl with your fingers and form them into little balls (for this part I really enjoy having surgical gloves handy, otherwise it can be a real mess).
Place a dozen or so balls on a parchment paper lined baking sheet, cover tightly with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 15 minutes. Remove the balls and roll each one in cocoa powder. Plate your truffles and garnish each with a pinch of dark chili powder.
When paired with a glass of Cabernet Sauvignon, these truffles are explosive. I suggest an Indian Wells Cab from Washington’s Chateau St. Michelle winery.
Enjoy!