Orange Truffles

A few weeks ago, I made a chocolate bundt cake with a ganache glaze and I had some leftover cream and chocolate chips, so what was I to do but make truffles? I made three varieties: plain chocolate ganache rolled in cocoa; plain chocolate rolled in cocoa mixed with cinnamon; and cayenne chocolate ganache rolled in a mixture of cocoa, ginger, cinnamon and powdered sugar. My roommates loved them, and there's nothing like a heaping serving of compliments to motivate me to repeat, improve and try variations on a recipe.

A friend of mine turned 29 on Saturday and seeing as I'm quite poor and I recently used the last of my spending money to purchase chocolate chips, cream and a digital food thermometer, I decided to make him some orange truffles. I gathered up a few dollars in change (I wasn't lying about that being the last of my spending money) and picked up a couple of organic oranges and lemons at the market down the street and set out to try my hand at dipped truffles.

...So I have this problem. I do one of two things when I'm trying a new recipe – I either research variations of it to the point that I don't have any clue where to start and end up mixing a bunch of ideas together, or I get over-ambitious and try to do something after only having the most basic idea of how it works. With this recipe, I did both. Truffle centers are ridiculously easy (according to my limited experience) and tempered chocolate is moderately difficult, so clearly I should have read a lot about tempering chocolate and gone with the first simple recipe for truffle centers that I happened upon. Only that's not how I roll.

I don't remember exactly how many recipes for orange truffle filling I looked at, but it was more than five. Most of them required Cointreau or other orange-flavored liqueur, none of which I had, so I stuck mostly to a very simple recipe I found on About.com that used only oranges, cream and chocolate. Also, this was my first time tempering chocolate, so of course I read one page of directions and decided I was ready to give it a try.

Orange Truffles

Ingredients:

• 2 oranges
• 1/2 cup heavy cream
• 18 oz semi-sweet chocolate, divided
• 1/3 cup cocoa powder for dusting
• candied orange peel

Preparation:

1. Use a large grater to remove the rind of one of the oranges and place the rind in a saucepan with the cream.
2. Use a fine grater or microplane and zest the other orange and set aside, covered.
3. Place the saucepan holding the cream and orange rind over medium heat and simmer until bubbles appear around the sides of the pan (at this point I also added a couple of tablespoons of orange juice from one of the oranges, and I added a bit more chocolate to compensate for the added liquid). Remove from the heat and cover. Let the cream sit for 30 minutes to infuse and absorb the citrus aromas.
4. Slowly melt 8 oz of chocolate in a double boiler (or a metal bowl placed over a sauce pan with simmering water), stirring to make sure all pieces are melted.
5. Reheat the cream slightly and pour through a strainer over the chocolate and stir to combine, being careful not to incorporate bubbles into ganache.
6. Gently stir in zest
7. Cool in the refrigerator until firm enough to shape (anywhere from a few hours to overnight)
8. Spoon or pipe 1-inch balls of ganache onto baking sheet covered in parchment paper and put in freezer for 2 hours
9. Dust your hands with cocoa powder, and roll the scooped truffles into round shapes. Return to the refrigerator for an hour to make them firm enough to dip in melted chocolate.
10. Temper the 10 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate, or alternately, melt the chocolate with 1 tablespoon of vegetable shortening. Dip the firm centers in the melted chocolate using dipping tools or two forks. Wipe the excess chocolate on the rim of the bowl, and place the dipped truffle back on the baking sheet. While chocolate is still wet, garnish with slivers of candied orange peel.

So when it came to tempering the chocolate, I failed. Miserably. Actually, I don't think I failed so much as Nestle Toll House Semi-Sweet Morsels failed me. I heated the chocolate in my makeshift double-boiler to 110 degrees, cooled it to 80, and reheated to 90 and it was incredibly thick. I stirred almost constantly, so I know it wasn't a problem with the heat not being evenly dispersed. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I think that a higher quality chocolate would result in a thinner chocolate at the correct dipping temperature. I know the quality of the chocolate affects the melting temperature, but I don't know much more than that.

I dipped a couple of truffles in the horribly thick tempered chocolate and it was a mess, but in hindsight it was better than what I ended up doing for the rest of them. I heated the chocolate up more in hopes that it would thin out and make dipping easier, which it did until it started to melt my truffle centers. I ended up with chocolate and ganache all over my hands and some very, very misshapen and shoddily covered truffles.

Most of them ended up somewhere between the two pictured here, but none of them are particularly beautiful (though they are quite scrumptious). I'm not pleased, but I am determined to master tempering chocolate and dipping truffles.

I haven't had a chance to give my friend his gift yet, but he already knows that things didn't go quite as planned. Thankfully, I also made candied lemon peel and orangettes later that night and those turned out much prettier (I'll post those soon). All together it should make a decent gift, but I do hope to never, ever give anyone anything quite this ugly again. Even if I do, though, I won't let that stop me.

"The only real stumbling block is fear of failure. In cooking you've got to have a 'What the hell' attitude." --Julia Child