Chocolate truffles are a luxurious, rich treat that are actually much easier to make than you might think. The basic ingredients are good chocolate and heavy cream. To this, some people add butter and/or liquers or other flavorings.

Combining the chocolate and cream (and butter if you go that way) yields the creamy ganache out of which the bite-sized truffles are formed. Traditionally, the ganache is coated with tempered chocolate (I don't do this step though -- I have my own ideas about what makes a good coating :-)

First: Chop a lot of chocolate. I use Callebaut 70% but use whatever type you like (milk chocolate, or white). It's best to use a serrated knife but this time I was faced with chopping 4lbs, so I brought out the big guns and just vacuumed up the mess from the far corners of the kitchen later...

There are lots of recipes out there for classic truffles and they all seem to give different proportions of chocolate:cream. Somewhere along the way I learned this rule of thumb, and it's worked out great:

For dark chocolate: 1lb choc. to 1.5 cups cream.

For milk chocolate: 1lb choc. to 1.0 cups cream.

For white chocolate: 1lb choc. to .75 cups cream.

If you're adding butter or flavorings in liquid form, it will replace cream ounce for ounce (a tablespoon is one ounce).

Making the Ganache

:: Place chopped chocolate in a glass bowl.

:: Heat cream (and liquid flavorings if any) in small saucepan. When it froths up, just short of a full boil, pour it over the chopped chocolate. Let sit five minutes.

Some recipes say to melt the chocolate and then add cream, but the method I use is easier -- if you melt the chocolate first, the cream has to be about the same temperature as the chocolate when you add them together. Too fussy for me!

:: Fold cream and melted chocolate together gently. If you're lazy at chopping like me and leave large chunks of chocolate, your mixture may cool before everything is melted. In that case, place the bowl over a pan of hot (not boiling) water and continue stirring until everything is melted.

At this point you can judge the success of your ganache. It should be smooth, shiny, thicker than paint but not as thick as set pudding. Let it cool, then...

::  Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and put it in the fridge for a few hours (or overnight) to set up (if after some time in the fridge it's still more liquid than solid, it makes great chocolate sauce!).

Making the Truffles!

:: Form the ganache into bite-size, irregular balls. You can use a melon baller for this, or a regular spoon -- in either case you'll need to do some rolling/shaping with your hands.

I won't lie: this part is messy. It's so messy, I don't have any pictures of the truffle-forming phase, even though I just made four batches of truffles tonight; sorry!

:: Coat your ganache truffles. If you're not going the tempered-chocolate-enrobing route, you have many tried-and-true coating options, including powdered cocoa, coconut, chopped nuts, powdered sugar, etc. Place your coating material in a small shallow bowl and roll the truffles around in it until they're coated. Simple as that.

In the past I've added coffee to the ganache; this year I decided to try tea in one batch, and ginger in another. Unfortunately I was guessing as to how much of either to add, and I didn't add enough. Oops -- still yummy, though!

I did four coatings: crushed walnuts; cinnamon; powdered sugar, and cocoa powder (these two latter types are shown in the last photo). The cocoa powder ones are my personal favorites, but I make them with Scharfenberger unsweetened cocoa, so they're not for the faint of heart or fans of milk or sweet chocolate!

OH! A pound of chocolate yields about 30 truffles, depending on how big you make them. The tray shown at right is one batch (one pound of chocolate).