Chocolate Truffles: Take 1

I'm going to visit my friend Stéphanie in Paris next weekend. Unfortunately for me, I don't believe she drinks (or if she does, she doesn't drink much), so my usual failsafe of bringing a bottle of my homemade gin infusions isn't going to work. After a bit of thinking, I eventually decided that I'd bring her some homemade chocolate truffles and possibly also some honeycomb (cinder toffee). The one slight snag is that I've never made truffles before. As I didn't want the possibility of making a hash of it the night before I left, I thought I'd better do a test batch.

Not Massively Successful Chocolate Truffles
Ingredients

• 100g dark chocolate
• 100g milk chocolate
• 300ml double cream
• Chopped hazelnuts
• Cocoa powder
• Ground cinnamon
• Ground nutmeg
  

Method

1. Chop the chocolate (separately) into small pieces.
2. Heat the cream in a saucepan to scalding point (just before it boils - when the cream starts making a hissing sound when you scrape the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon)
3. Pour half of the cream over each portion of chocolate and stir with a wooden spoon until smooth - this is a ganache.
4. Refrigerate until the ganaches set.
5. Scoop and form into small balls with teaspoons and hands.
6. Refrigerate the truffles for another 15 minutes to let them set properly.
   
7. Roll the formed truffles in the toppings (nuts, cocoa, sugar and cinnamon) either individually or in mixtures to coat the outside of each truffle and prevent them from sticking.
8. Alternatively, melt some chocolate over a water bath and coat the truffles in the melted chocolate. Make sure the truffles are cool before being chocolate coated, or they go rather soft! Allow to set on a Teflon baking sheet.

It's just as well I did a test batch - my quantities are completely wrong! I used about twice as much cream as I had intended to. Oops. As a result, the milk chocolate truffles are unbelievably (and unworkably) soft. The dark chocolate truffles are difficult to work with, but just about manageable - these actually turned out okay, but the milk chocolate ones were a complete disaster.

Here are the ganaches just before refrigerating them:
And here are the ganaches straight out of the fridge:Just after forming, but before dusting:
And the finished truffles:
The milk chocolate truffles were so unbelievably soft that the only way that they could possibly be eaten was if they were coated in chocolate, so I didn't even try to dust any of them. As you can see, I didn't even finish coating all of them - it was a real uphill struggle. Anyway, the dark chocolate truffles were much better and seem to be salvagable.