Chocolate Truffles

While I've been excited and intrigued about Artisan Bread class, I've been more on the fence when it comes to my Candies & Confectionaries class.....  

I like detail. I like tedious (most of the time, case in point: viennoiserie).  But the process of tempering chocolate starts to make me panic.  I never realized how much goes into tempering chocolate, and more importantly, keeping it "in temper."  I'm feeling stressed just thinking about it.....  

Oh and did I mention that chocolate is messy.  Completely and horribly messy.  Usually, I don't mind messy things.  Dough and flour and icing do not bother me.  Chocolate does.

But, these feelings didn't stop me from taking tons of pictures in class as we were making delicious truffles!

Because my class is so new to this whole tempering thing, we used pre-made shells (my group used the milk chocolate ones, and the other groups did white chocolate and dark chocolate).  But we did make the  ganache filling.

One group made pistachio white chocolate ganache....

The other group made Banana Black Current Dark Chocolate Ganache....

And we made Orange Milk Chocolate Ganache!  (with an entire bottle of Contreau, might I add...)

So, we filled the pre-made shells.

And topped them with a little tempered chocolate, just to seal the liquid centers in.

Now comes the messiest part... rolling the truffles in more tempered chocolate.  Thankfully, I ended up being the one in charge of keeping the chocolate temp correct and for replacing the sheet pans as they were filled.

Messy chocolate....

Next, we piped thin stripes of contrasting chocolate.....

My group chose to use both white and dark chocolate for striping on ours.

Here are the final products! Yum Yum! We were "required" to try one of each.  How terrible!  (not)

We made crazy amounts of truffles!

And yes, they were wonderfully delicious.  But I'm still not sure chocolate is my forte.   Guess only time will tell!