Our Valentine’s gift to you: our favorite truffle recipe. This originally appeared in the newsletter of the neighborhood in which Luscious resides. Because it contained none our typical references to alcohol and drugs or even a single 4-letter word, we thought it was, like, Sunday school conservative. Nonetheless, all the snarky bits got edited out and it sounded like Suzanne Sommers wrote the fucking thing. So here it is, in its entirety.

So. Some people think they’re too socially conscious or something for Valentine’s Day, because “it’s a hyped up Hallmark holiday and I show my love all year long, not just on one day, blah, blah.”  Ummm, whatever—did you say something about love, we stopped listening. Valentine’s day is about one thing: chocolate. Make your sweetie some of these easy, homemade, earl grey infused truffles, and then give him/her/it irresistible doe-eyed looks until they share them with you.

Ingredients:
2/3 cup heavy cream
2 tablespoons salted butter, cut into a few pieces
4 Earl Grey tea bags; the better quality the tea, the more fragrant your truffles will be
6 oz. bittersweet chocolate
6 oz. semisweet chocolate
(use the best chocolate, like El Rey or Scharfenberger, you can get. Remember, the plan is to eat half of these yourself)

Coatings
1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1/2 cup finely crushed almonds
1/2 cup powdered sugar

Bring the cream and butter to a boil, then turn heat to low, a bare simmer at the most. Put the tea bags in the cream (dangle the tags off the side or snip them off) and let that steep for about 10 minutes. Take out the tea bags.

While you’re impatiently waiting for the tea to steep in the cream, chop up the chocolate very fine, or be lazy and put it a food processor. Have a whisk at hand. Put the chocolate in a sturdy glass bowl, then pour the warm cream through a fine mesh sieve over the chocolate and whisk like crazy until the chocolate melts and the mixture is smooth. At this point, try not to just grab a spoon start eating. Exercise restraint and place the bowl in the fridge. Then go find something productive to for about 30 minutes to an hour or more, until the chocolate is firm enough to roll into little balls, as that’s what you’ll do next.

Put the cocoa powder, crushed almonds, and powdered sugar into individual small bowls.  Lay out a sheet of wax paper on a baking sheet. Use a spoon or a small ice cream scoop, or a melon baller (okay, you probably don’t have a melon baller) and scoop out about a 1″ inch diameter hunk of the chocolate mixture, then roll around in your hand to make a ball. Then roll your little chocolate ball in one of your 3 coatings, put it on the wax paper, and voilá, a truffle. Continue until you use all the chocolate mix, varying your coatings. You may need to wipe your hand frequently, this can get messy.  During this process, eat at least two truffles for quality assurance purposes. Note: it’s best to keep the truffles refrigerated.

For a fancy presentation, you can get candy boxes and the little pleated brown candy cups at baking supply or art/hobby stores.

xoxo
Luscious