But really; how many other truffle-related phrases are hanging out there begging for use as blog post titles? None that I could think of. But perhaps you're more inventive than I'm feeling at the moment.
Yesterday I decided to make some Oreo truffles. It wasn't just a spur-of-the-moment whim: I was planning on bringing a few along as a hostess gift when the Husband and I head over to a friend's place for dinner tonight. What can I say? My momma raised me right: I try to be punctilious in matters of etiquette.
Anyway; since we only snagged this recipe because of someone else, I figured I'd share the love and pay it forward (and any other clichéd song/movie titles you can think of) and pass the recipe along. Here is your list of required equipment:
- a blender (trust me...this makes things easier)
- a big mixing spoon
- a mixing bowl (obvi)
- a cookie sheet with baking paper
- your chosen method of chocolate melting (incidentally, mine is to make my husband do it since I tend to burn the chocolate when left to my own devices. He lets it go a few rounds in the microwave, stirring in between.)
- Some skewers
- Oh, and the food: a roll of Oreos (or half a pack of Bourbons if you're feeling cheap), 1 tub of cream cheese, 3 bars of plain milk chocolate, 1 bar of white chocolate.
To start: grab your chosen chocolate cookies and - breaking them up a bit to speed things along - place them in the blender and pulverize into a nice gritty powder. Sort of like this:
Next step: add in the whole tub of cream cheese. Make sure to mix it in really well. Think of it like cutting in Crisco to biscuit dough or pie crust mix. Thanks to the consistency of the cream cheese, it tends to require this sort of technique. Or at least, I require this sort of technique since I don't have wrists of steel that can whip meringues for hours or silently strangle a man in less than 30 seconds.
Oh, and once you've mixed everything together, it should look a bit like this:
Helpful Photo is helpful.
Now comes the slightly messy part. Get out your baking tray covered in baking paper. Time to shape the truffles! Just grab enough to make a sphere with the circumference of a quarter or a 10p piece (depending on which one you actually know the size of!), roll it out in your hands, and place it on the baking tray. Once you have enough of them, pop them in the fridge for an hour or two to chill. Trust me: you don't want to skip the chillin' in da fridge step: it helps the truffles stay in one spherical piece when you dip them into hot, melted chocolate.
Waited a few hours to chill your truffle innards? Good. Now to dip them. This is where the skewers come in handy. Yes, they tend to leave unfortunate skewer marks in the truffles when you pull them out, but unlike dipping by hand or by spoon (or by land or by sea like Paul Revere...), the skewers don't mess up the smooth finish of the chocolate. And, you can always cover the hole with more chocolate.
Try to get the chocolate as lump-free as possible. You can heat it in a bowl sitting in a pot of boiling water on medium heat on the stove, but be careful to watch for burning. Or, you can put the chocolate in a bowl and pop it in the microwave for a minute or two, but again - watch for the burning. You really only want to pop it in for about 10 seconds at a time, then take it out, stir it around, and sling it back in the microwave. Otherwise, the already-melted bits hold all the heat and burn, while the not-yet-melted bits just take longer to liquefy.
Now that that's done, you can - for the sake of prettiness - melt that bar of white chocolate and then drizzle it over the top of your truffles for a fun two-tone effect. It makes them look much more posh than just leaving them as slightly mangled balls of chocolate coated cream-cheesy cookie.
See what I mean? Much nicer-looking than before. You can pop them back in the fridge again to keep cool until you're ready to ravenously devour serve them. It's a brilliant fix for any time that you need cute finger foods, a hostess gift, party favours (just stick 4 each into little bags), or any other occasion that calls for fancy chocolatey treats. Which is basically any occasion at all, as far as I'm concerned. And despite being really easy to make, people will be ludicrously impressed with your culinary skillz once they try them. You know, in case you're actually the sort of person worried about building up domestic goddess street cred...like Snoop D-O-double G:
For rizzle, yo.
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