Happy Sunday! No cakes today but another yummy confection to share with you all. With the beginning of the holidays I tend to make little favors to give out or favors for clients to give out to their clients for meetings, mixers or just end of the year gifts. These can be anything from chocolate covered marshmallows to brownies to truffles. 

I had a client come to me and ask me if I could find her a recipe for wine truffles. I'd never heard of them before but went to look up a recipe and found several. When you come upon lots of different recipes for the same titled item then what you want to do is compare those and see what is the most consistent of the group. Which variation pops up more than others. This is the one that is going to be the most reliable. So I emailed her the recipe and a few weeks later she offered me the job of making them and packaging them up for her.

First of all, here is the recipe:

1/2 cup heavy cream
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate, baking bar (Ghirardelli 60%)
6 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into small pieces
1/2 cup red wine, cabernet sauvignon
cocoa powder
Directions:

1. Coarsley chop chocolate and place into a medium sized bowl.
2. Bring cream to a simmer, add butter and stir until melted.
3. Pour the cream over the chocolate. Stir with a spatula until the chocolate is melted.
4. Add the red wine and stir until wine is incorporated.
5. Pour into an 8x8 baking dish and refridgerate for at least 4 hours
6. Use a metal cookie scoop to scoop out a truffle. Coat your hands in cocoa powder and gently roll the chocolate until it forms a ball. Roll in cocoa to coat.
7.Keep refridgerated. 

Ok, so now here is where the learning curve came into play. I thought, why roll them in cocoa when I can dip them into milk chocolate instead? You see the result of my first effort in the photo above. Looks pretty good, right? Yeah, that's what I thought too. Then I dipped the second truffle, then the third, and realized they were MELTING into my coating chocolate. Apparently the wine lowers the melting point of the truffles quite a bit. Fortunately this recipe makes about 30 truffles and I only needed 24 so I quickly changed tactics and started following the recipe where it clearly says "roll in cocoa to coat". Sometimes fiddling with a recipe is really not a good idea. 

But here is the upside...because the melting point is much lower for these truffles than the regular type they melt in the mouth almost instantly. The "mouth feel" is incredible! And the wine flavor is just a hint in the background of the chocolate and not overpowering in any way. Because of the lower melting point though, these DO have to be refrigerated.  So keep them in the fridge till presentation and then pass them around. I boxed up two per favor but, really, one is so rich that it is really enough. All of that butter and chocolate and cream is truly decadent!

This upcoming week will bring a fun Poker Cake to share! See you then!

Cat