Every year for Christmas, both my grandmother and my mother gift me with big boxes of Ferrero Rocher, the faux fancy chocolate candy that they even sell at Rite-Aid. I fell in love with these delicious milk chocolate hazelnut crunchy balls the first time I went to Sam's Club and had a free sample in a giant, soulless warehouse, bestowed upon me by a grumpy senior in a blue vest. I can see the concrete floors and exposed rafters every time I unwrap the shiny gold covering. What a beautiful food memory.
I wish I had a better beginning for my Homemade Chocolate Hazelnut Truffle blog but apparently I am honest to a painful fault. I still love the packaged gold chocolates and they were my first exposure to the chocolate/hazelnut combination, which is the only version of chocolate that I actually crave, being more of a "Peaches & Cream" type of dessert person. At any rate, I made some delicious chocolate/hazelnut truffles the other night and the good news for you is that they are super easy so I will probably make them again in the near future. This time I made them at home in my kitchen surrounded by friends and drinking wine. That sounds better already.
The inspiration for the truffles was some Hazelnut butter I snagged from work. I originally was going to make cookies but decided they weren't worthy of such a fantastic ingredient. Hazelnut butter is pure pressed hazelnuts with no sugar added and it smells and tastes heavenly. I envisioned a moist, almost chewy chocolate truffle version of Nutella and I completely hit the mark.
I knew that I should follow some semblance of a recipe so I started looking. Some books at work yielded several recipes but all required a grocery store trip so I vetoed those. And I don't have internet at home so I couldn't just mess around searching for a recipe that fit my pantry ingredients. The Johns Island library had no chocolate truffle books (big surprise) and only one candy book, Candy for Dummies, which yielded some pretty basic truffle recipes that I molded to fit my needs. Basically I heated heavy cream and sugar and combined it with bittersweet chocolate. I proceeded to whisk in the hazelnut butter. So easy. It went in the fridge to harden for about an hour. The book then suggests that I temper chocolate to dip them in. That requires several rounds of heating and temperature taking. No fun. So I just skipped that part and rolled them around in some sweetened cocoa powder. I would have loved to roll them around in chopped hazelnuts but those are expensive and also absent on Johns Island. Cocoa it was, and since they didn't have a chocolate layer first, they only looked pretty for a day but then you just roll them around in more cocoa powder. No one will complain about more cocoa powder.
See how they look messy and dirty??? This is how chocolate truffles were originally designed to look, resembling their fungi counterpart covered in dirt. I wish I could say this was a picture of my truffles but they all got eaten before I could take one. They did however look exactly like the ones above.
