My husband and I decided to make chocolate truffles for holiday presents this year, and my favorite ones we made were these marzipan ones. Marzipan is a paste of ground almonds and sugar and is used in European desserts a lot. These truffles were really easy to make and had a big wow factor. So, I wanted to share them with you all. I have more information in my blog post:
http://figswithbri.com/?p=101Enjoy!
Marzipan Truffles
Ingredients:
a little less than 2 to 1 ratio of chocolate to cream, as example, say, 8 ounces chocolate and 5 ounces cream (we used a dark, bittersweet chocolate since the marzipan is already quite sweet)
1-2 packages of marzipan (we used a 7 oz. tube of Odense)
almond extract
white sugar
Tools:
double boiler (or bowl suspended over a saucepan with an inch or two of simmering water)
rubber or silicone spatula
melon baller (small scoop should be 1/2 tsp size or smaller)
cookie sheet (preferably cold from the fridge or freezer)
parchment paper
rolling pin
2 1/2 round cookie cutter
toothpicks
Ganache:
Chop the chocolate into small uniform chunks and put into a bowl. Heat cream in double boiler until small bubbles form around the edges. Remove from heat and add half of the cream to the chocolate chunks, stirring with the spatula to melt the chocolate. Incorporate more of the cream into the chocolate to continue to melt it, until the mixture becomes smooth and glossy. If you need a little heat to facilitate meltage, you can put the bowl over the simmering water for 10-15 seconds at a time, just don’t scorch it and make sure the bottom of the bowl does not touch the water. All of this will vary depending on the humidity and temperature in the room, type of chocolate, water content in your cream, etc. So, this is all a guide, not hard and fast rules.
Once you’ve reached smooth, melted, glossy chocolate ganache, this is the time to take it off the heat and add flavorings. You could split it up into a few separate bowls to create different flavors. How strongly flavored your particular chocolate and almond extract are, will determine how much of the extract you use. Start with say, 1 tsp. and keep tasting and adding extract as you like. You are creating this for yourself, so flavor it to your taste, once you think you’ve gotten it to a place you like, have someone else taste it as well. Believe me, once you’ve tasted it 4 or 5 times, it’s good to get another perspective. You also don’t want to overpower the chocolate with too much extract, so start with a small amount and add more. If you accidentally add too much, you could make a little more ganache, to dilute it.
When it tastes delicious, press plastic wrap down on the top of the ganache, and put the bowl in the freezer for about 2 hours, or you can put it in the fridge and come back to it a day or two later, to start the balling process. You will want the ganache to be hard enough to scoop individual balls out of, but not so hard you need Hulk-like strength. Based on our experience, it’s best to make the balls of ganache smaller than you think they should be. They will be covered in marzipan, (or tempered chocolate, if you were going that route) so they will gain another 50% or so in size.
A smaller truffle is a treat, that leaves you wanting more, a giant truffle is too sickeningly sweet, and can become a chore.
The most effective way we found for balling the cold ganache, is to warm the melon baller scoop in very hot water or in the flame of the gas stove. Warm though, not so hot the chocolate melts and sizzles. Then, if you have the technique right, you can scoop the chocolate into balls, and just tap it onto the cookie sheet. Warm the scoop again when you start having to fish around with your finger to smoosh the ganache out. Just make sure the scoop is dry when you start balling again.
The ganache balls most likely will not be perfect balls, right out of the scoop, so it’s best to have another person there to help you by rolling them quickly between their palms. It becomes a much messier job, and a lot slower, if you try to scoop them and roll in your hands yourself. You want to work relatively quickly too, because the ganache is getting softer and softer the more time it spends out of the fridge/freezer, and therefore harder to work with. You’ll end up with a lot more on your hands than on the cookie sheet.
Marzipan:
When you have all of your ganache balls made, put the tray into the freezer for about 1 hour (less if you were able to work quickly and they are still cold). While the balls of ganache are chillin’ in the freezer, time to play with marzipan. Between two layers of parchment, roll the marzipan as thin as you can, (about 1/16 inch) without being transparent. We found that a 2 1/2 inch cookie cutter created the perfect sized circles to wrap around the ganache balls, but you could also free-hand it, or improvise with something else.
Remember that you don’t want to stain the outside of the marzipan layer with chocolate on your fingers, so toothpicks come in very handy at this stage. When your ganache balls are chilled, you can get started, by picking one up with a toothpick and dropping it in the center of your circle. Then wrap the marzipan around the chocolate, sealing it up with an excess of marzipan at the end.
Cut that excess marzipan off, and roll the the marzipan truffle between your palms to smooth it into a ball. If you accidentally cut into the chocolate, it is easy to patch with a little excess marzipan. Eat that little brown bit, so you don’t contaminate the other marzipan with chocolate. Every time you have extra marzipan left over, you can just smoosh it together again, roll it out, and make another truffle. Roll each one in white sugar, and you’ve got tasty, festive holiday treats that look like little snowballs. We found little paper baking and party cups to present them in, from our local craft store in the candy/cake decorating section.
It’s hard to say just how many truffles you’ll get out of each batch, since the size will vary, but using the small scoop of the melon baller, we got over 30 truffles from 6 oz. chocolate and 3-4 oz. cream. Then rolling it out thin, we got 17 marzipan circles from a 7 oz. package. We could have bought another package of marzipan, but I think we’ll dip the rest of the almond ganache balls in tempered chocolate and top them with a sliced or slivered almond to give a hint of what’s inside.
