Chocolate Truffles: Take 2

Rehearsals are over, now it's time for the real thing. This time, I took a bit more care over things and got the amounts of cream much closer to what I had been intending previously. Seeing how the milk chocolate truffles from the last batch turned out so much softer than the plain chocolate ones, I did adapt the amounts of cream slightly to how much cocoa was in the chocolate. So, eventually, here's what I used:

Extra dark chocolate truffles
100g 75% cocoa plain chocolate
~85ml cream

Dark chocolate truffles
200g 50% cocoa plain chocolate
~150ml cream

Milk chocolate truffles
100g 21% cocoa milk chocolate
~65ml cream

When it came to the extra dark chocolate truffles, I was worried about the cream not being hot enough to melt the chocolate, so I melted the chocolate first. Unfortunately, me being an idiot, I forgot to let the scalded cream cool before I added it to the molten chocolate - and so it split. I learned my lesson though - for the milk chocolate truffles, I just added the hot cream to the chocolate and then stuck it in the microwave for 10 seconds when not all of the chocolate melted. That worked much better.

The formed but not coated truffles:So after nearly four hours of work, here is the finished product!As you can see, some are dusted (the extra-dark chocolate truffles were a bit more bitter, so the dusting has had icing sugar added, hence the difference in colour), some rolled in chopped hazelnuts, some coated in chocolate and some rolled in chopped hazelnuts and coated in chocolate. I must say, it looks a lot more promising than the previous batch, though I didn't try any of the finished truffles. I did try a bit of each ganache, and even the split extra dark chocolate one tasted pretty good. I just hope Stéphanie likes them! I think I may have made one slight mistake though... I'm not sure the gift box I bought is big enough!

I think a dash of rum added to the ganache would be really nice, though I left it out as I don't know if Stéphanie drinks. I did think maybe a dash of vanilla or hazelnut extract in the ganache would go well too, but I thought I'd not experiment with this batch - perhaps I'll try it next time. I also thought that using chocolate orange to coat the truffles might be a nice change from the plain chocolate coating. So many possibilities!