Fighting the Good Fight

I came across a very detailed truffle recipe late last week. It seemed easy enough, and I was somewhat curious, so I added it to the ToDo list. Then, over the weekend, I was cleaning out our pantry and I found a graveyard of chocolate nubbins.

My grocery store carries quite a few lines of gourmet chocolate, and I make a habit of buying a different bar every few weeks for research purposes. They get thrown in my pantry and sampled randomly, usually while I'm doing homework. And apparently, they get eventually forgotten, until I'm rooting through the cabinets looking for pizza sauce and I end up sitting in a pile of half eaten chocolate bars.

The most embarrassing part of all this is that during my most recent foraging expedition, I came across not just bar remnants, but a brick of Ghiradelli dark(?) that my mom had given me a good long while ago. Ghiradelli wins taste tests against Scharffenberger & co. hands down, and I decided that something must be done.

I spent Monday morning making a bread sponge and melting chocolate. The truffle recipe calls for a ratio of 2:1 chocolate to liquid, and that's about where I started. 11oz chocolate and 5 or 6 oz of heavy cream. But as I was digging through the fridge for the cream, I found some caramel syrup I'd made a week previously as a mousse topping. And then there was about a 1/4c of coffee left over from breakfast. I thought caramel mocha truffles sounded really good.

No matter how much coffee or caramel I added, I couldn't get the flavor of either to cut through the chocolate. I used the 1/4c of coffee, and when that wasn't enough, I mixed up a few tablespoons of really strong instant and threw it in. And then that didn't help.

By this point, I'd given up on the flavor elements, because the chocolate by itself was pretty incredible. I put the ganache in the fridge to set up so that I could shape truffles later. But it didn't want to set. It thickened, but it never got hard enough to scoop. I figured I needed to add more chocolate to balance out the additional liquid, but I didn't have any more chocolate to use.

Monday night, however, I was rooting around in another cupboard for chicken broth (the pot sticker event) and I found 3 unopened boxes of unsweetened baker's chocolate.

These weren't my fault. I don't know where they came from, though my guess is they belonged to a former housemate. But they looked like good truffle material.

This morning, I woke up to a lot of snow and ice and decided that making truffles was a better plan than trying to walk to school, so I melted the chocolate with some sugar, mixed it into the ganache and threw it in the fridge. And now, I'm waiting to see if it will work. I added 4 oz of pure chocolate to the ganache. It occurs to me now that that might not have been enough. We'll see.