Chocolate Fun

Ok, so after I made the salmon rillette, I felt I still had enough time to do more cooking.  Jingnan had left me with a box of delicious chocolate truffles, which she said she couldn't find in the UK.

As you can imagine, they're pretty tasty.  I thought I'd try my hand at recreating them, so being the lazy bastard that I am, I went for the simplest recipe I could find to start out.  I found this one.  It calls for chocolate, cream, and cocoa powder, all of which I had, and the prep seemed pretty easy.  I even thought I'd be clever and add a teaspoon of vanilla to the cream.  All in all, it was pretty easy to make, with the exception of getting my hands really messy.

The truffles came out looking all right, but when I tried them on Monday, I discovered that they were a little too chocolaty.  I know what you're thinking, "But Matt, how can anything be too chocolaty?"  Trust me, truffles made out of 85% cocoa dark chocolate and rolled in 100% cocoa powder turns out to have just a little too much bite.  Plus, I felt that they were a little too hard.  I definitely want to make these again, with a few changes:

1:  Use some lesser dark chocolate; maybe I'll drop down to 65% cocoa solids.
2:  Add a little extra sugar or flavorings, I might even add more vanilla.
3:  Use an pastry bag with a big tip instead of rolling the truffles in my hands.  This will make them look more like the ones on the box, and I won't have to wash my hands five times while I'm making them.

If you're curious about what they looked like, here they are chilling in the refrigerator:

That's the rillette in the back right there, cooling so it would be nice and creamy on Monday.

Finally, because I'm some kind of chocolate and cream freak, I made some hot chocolate to help me wind down from all the cooking.  Actually, I had some cream left over, and an old half-empty can of sweetened condensed milk (SCM) that I needed to get rid of, so I thought I'd better use them before I gave in and just threw them out.

I've never tried making hot chocolate with SCM before, but believe me, I will again.  That stuff is awesome!  I just heated up the cream, SCM, and some milk to thin it out, and pored it over some Green & Black's organic dark chocolate, and the results were delicious.

That picture does it no justice, but this one might give you an idea of the flavor:

Anyway, Green & Blacks is now my favorite dark chocolate purveyor.  I had a couple of pieces before I melted it in the cream, and I was throughly impressed.