Steve's Special Request

Since an employee made some for him at Christmas, Steve has been begging me to make him some Oreo balls, so I decided to that this year instead of truffles. They were so easy! But a little tedious. It's just crushed Oreos and a package of cream cheese. You blend those and roll the result into balls. I froze them then to reduce the mess and dipped then into white chocolate. I ran out of white chocolate part way through and mixed it with regular. Yummy! The huge one is for Steve.

Experimenting with Chocolate

So in addition to loving crafting, I love to experiment with desserts, particularly chocolate. For the past year, I've been experimenting with chocolate truffles; just a simple recipe from a Nestle Tollhouse cookbook. It's really easy and everyone loves them when I make them. So for awhile I was experimenting with flavors for the truffles and dipping them in chocolate.

While I was at Michaels's the other day, I came across some candy molds, so I decided to buy a "bon-bon" mold and see if I could make chocolates that were filled with my truffles for a smoother look. Last week I tried it and made some with coconut, mint, and peanut butter truffle filling. Then I experimented and tried a liquid raspberry, marshmallow, and coffee-toffee fillings. The only one that wasn't very good was the raspberry which had too much powdered sugar in it. So I had some left over red and blue Wilton chocolate melts from a project I did with the kids at the summer care program at work, so I tried to do some more chocolates today and they turned out pretty good. The picture isn't so hot because I took it with my phone, but you can see generally what they looked like.

The brown ones had a peanut butter truffle filling, the white a coconut cream (which was a bit too runny I think), the red a kahlua truffle filling (my favorite), and the blue a liquid raspberry filling. The raspberry was better this time, but I just can't get it right. I used raspberry jam, light cream, powdered sugar, and corn starch. I think if I used fresh raspberries instead of raspberry jam it would be better. Any suggestions on how to improve it?

The marshmallow were good; I just used marshamallows, powedered sugar and cream. The coconut cream was good, but too runny. Everyone else seemed to really like the coffee ones. I mixed some instant coffee with heavy cream, then added powdered sugar and corn starch. After that I added in some toffee bits.

No matter how they taste, they look pretty cool. Any suggestions on how to improve the recipes would be appreciated. I have fun making them which is the best part!