Truffle Disaster

Oh my goodness! That about sums up how I feel about making truffles at this moment. Since this was the first time, I expected to have some difficulties. But man this was just aweful. I wanted to make Raspberry ganache truffles since Raspberry and Chocolate are pretty much the best flavor combinations ever. I got the recipe from http://candy.about.com/od/chocolatetrufflerecipes/r/choc_rasp_truff.htm. It seemed like it'd be easy enough but I was a bit mistaken.  I decided to use fresh raspberries instead of frozen because I already had them on hand. I made everything as per the instructions. Except I'm not a big fan of chopping chocolate. It gets chocolate powder everywhere and is just a pain. So if you're like me (lazy :P), I would suggest melting the chocolate partially before you add the cream. I ended up having to put the mixture over a double boiler to finish melting the chocolate all the way. I've made raspberry ganache before in class, but this was much thicker and wasn't  nearly as smooth.

 

I refrigerated that overnight, because by the time it was ready to be scooped, it was already 10:30. Even after being refrigerated overnight, the ganche was still extremely liquid and incredibly hard to work with. I started out trying to scoop them as per the instructions. The last 2 rows are my attempts at scooping with a portion scoop.

 

When those came out horrible, I tried piping them. This didn't work very well either. As you can see, they look like little piles of you-know-what.

 

However, the last few seemed to come out ok with the portion scoop. I don't know how I managed to get a kind of mound shape out of them. Maybe it was because the ganache warmed up a little bit. However, they may look like the perfect shape for a truffle, they ended up spreading out and turned out more flat than round. And they still had the imperfections on them from where they stuck to the portion scoop.

I then froze them for a few hours. I used Wilton Chocolate melts to coat them. but unfortunately most of them weren't frozen all the way so they were impossible to coat. So I put them back in the freezer for a few more hours. When I took them out, I tried to remelt the chocolate, but it has some of the ganache filling in in because of my first attempts. So it was pretty thick and wouldn't work to coat anything.

 

To make the chocolate liquid again, I had to add ALOT of shortening. That worked really well and didn't seem to alter the taste of the chocolate at all.

 

Once they were frozen they were alittle easier to coat, but not much. I had to take each out one at a time and leave the rest in the freezer or they would get too soft. And after I coated them, the bottom wouldn't be covered. I had to wait for them to dry, pick them up, and separately coat the bottom and wait for them to dry.

 

Finally!! I was done. And they came out looking like misshapen lumps of [insert word here]. I tried to make them look nicer by drizzling them with white chocolate. While it helped a bit, they were still misshapen. :(

 

These were my favorite ones. They're the only ones which came out looking even remotely truffle looking.

 

Wow! What an awful time. I'm going to attempt these again but probably with a different recipe. If I did use this recipe again, I would try freezing the ganache before I scooped it to try and get a better shape. They are delicious though.