Sweet Melissa Sundays: Peanut Butter Truffles

Our host for this week's Sweet Melissa Sundays was Mara of Love Your Mother Earth. Mara chose Peanut Butter Truffles as our recipe, which has the classic combination of Chocolate and Peanut Butter. If you ask ME, sweet is almost always made better by the addition of Salty, and these truffles do just that. The truffle base is made with heavy cream, chocolate, butter, and peanut butter, and it is rolled in a coating of chopped, salted nuts. Yu-um.

Based on everyone else's reactions in the SMS forum, this was a.) light on the peanut butteriness and b.) a very messy procedure. Knowing this ahead of time, I upped the amount of peanut butter in the recipe and decreased the butter a tiny bit. I made a half batch of these bad boys, and halved all of the ingredients. But instead of halving the Peanut Butter, I actually increased it from 1/4 C to 1/3 C. I'm glad I upped the PB because, even with my more than doubled ratio of PB to chocolate, the chocolate flavor was still more prominent (though you could taste the PB). I decreased the butter to 2 TBL, used high quality belgium dark chocolate (its 71% was the closest I could find at the grocery store to the 64-68% Melissa calls for in the recipe), and used sea salted, dry roasted, chopped peanuts. Also, from the kind warning of the other SMS-ers about how MESSY this was, I was prepared and took off my rings before starting. :) And just how messy did I get? Well...

UUUHH, very.

Overall these were very good. Definitely needed to up the Peanut Butter in order to call these "Peanut Butter Truffles". I'm glad I read and learned from the other SMS'ers before preparing these, because the more-than-doubled amount of peanut butter was totally necessary.





Thanks for hosting, Mara! For the recipe, visit Mara's blog, Love Your Mother Earth. How did this work out for all of the other members of Sweet Melissa Sundays? Visit the SMS Blogroll to see for yourself!

Sweet Melissa Sundays: Hazelnut Truffles!

Ohhh boy. Hazelnut coffee every morning. Hazelnut Creamer. In Italy, the gelato of choice: nocciola. Favorite thing to go with peanut butter: Nutella. Needless to say, I was totally excited about this week's choice: Hazelnut Truffles. Yummm!!

But! Some things got in the way of making them strictly according to the recipe in the Sweet Melissa Baking Book. I went to virtually every store in Central Florida and found no hazelnuts! Ug! I know for a fact that I've purchased hazelnuts this time of year in New York... when I first came back from Italy last July armed with an authentic and delicious hazelnut biscotti recipe, I went to the closest Stop and Shop and picked up a big bag of them to immediately bake into the crunchy italian cookies. However! Just like I have trouble finding almond paste here in Fla year round (no such problem in NY) I could not get my hands on any hazelnuts. Arghh!! So I bought some macadamia nuts (which turned out to be half price, gotta love those at-the-register surprises!). And Dan's mom surprised me by picking out all the hazelnuts from a big container of mixed nuts! Is she not the nicest ever??? So, I learned how to blanch nuts, too... which turned out to actually be rather simple, really. And I wound up with a delicious mixture of toasted macadamia nuts and hazelnuts. The smell as they were toasting was... increddddddible.



After they were toasted, and cooled, I pulse chopped them in the food processor:


For the chocolate, I didn't use anything super fancy-shmancy. I chose the Ghirardelli Semi-Sweet chocolate chips.


Oooh and the smell of the toasted nuts, the melted chocolate mixed with the Frangelico... mmmmm


For my topping, I experimented! After reading Nina's post on the Truffles P&Q page of the Sweet Melissa Sundays group site, I totally copied her idea for coating in Rice Krispy treats. Thanks, Nina! And it turns out great minds think alike, because when I read her post on truffles, I saw she decided to coat with Graham Cracker Crumbs, too. I had four toppings: Graham Cracker Crumbs, Nilla Wafer Crumbs, Rice Krispies, and the toasted nut mixture:


The end result? Ohhh so good. Even Daniel who "doesn't like chocolate" could be spotted poppin' a few in his mouth.





Be sure to read the other SMS Bloggers' posts on Truffles! And see Annie of Living Life Foodcariously for the recipe. Nice pick, Annie! It was a winner in this house.