Truffle no Trifle Creating indulgent sweets for your sweeite simple but time-consuming

“The taste of chocolate is a sensual pleasure in itself, existing in the same world as sex. For myself, I can enjoy the wicked pleasure of chocolate, entirely by myself.”

– Dr. Ruth Westheimer

If chocolate is a wicked pleasure, then truffles are the ultimate indulgence – their rich, soft centers wrapped in a creamy candy shell or dusted with powdery cocoa. But why keep them to yourself?

This Valentine’s Day, you can share the passion by making truffles for your sweetie. After all, chocolate is the food of love, and these decadent treats are easier to make than you’d think.

“It’s not difficult at all,” said Jan Campbell, who owns Cakes by Jan in Bangor. “It’s just time-consuming.”

As Campbell dipped a ball of whipped chocolate and cream into a pool of melted chocolate, she described how she taught herself how to make truffles.

“I figured out how to do things, like patch up a hole,” she said as she tossed a truffle around to cover a bare spot on its coating. “It’s a learning experience. Everything you do is a learning experience.”

Campbell’s specialty is cakes, but she sells candy-making supplies, and she started making truffles for Christmas and Valentine’s Day to interest her customers. She has picked up a few tricks along the way, such as covering her hands in cornstarch and rolling the cooled centers around before dipping them in chocolate. She also works in small batches, because the centers get hard to work with if they are out of the refrigerator for too long.

“That’s the trickiest part of the whole thing,” Campbell said.

Lisa Whiting, who owns The Gothic cafe in Belfast, echoed Campbell’s advice during a recent interview.

“The main key for all chocolate work is temperature,” Whiting said while sitting at her kitchen table. “You really want a cool environment. … Chocolate is so sensitive to heat.”

She only makes truffles at The Gothic from November through Christmas, when the cafe closes for the season. If she tries to make them earlier in the fall, the silky chocolate-ganache centers get too soft to work with.

“Chocolate ganache is an all-purpose French concoction used for truffle filling or to glaze cakes,” Whiting explained. “It’s a really nice, really smooth chocolate filling.”

Whiting uses a basic ganache recipe, which is a combination of cream and chocolate, as her foundation. Usually she jazzes it up by infusing the cream with flavor or replacing some of it with a small portion of liqueur or whiskey.

“You don’t want to go crazy, but liquor kind of gives it that punch,” Whiting said. “That’s where you play and have your variety.”

And variety is the fun part. Whiting said that as long as you stick to the basic proportions, you can’t really go wrong. Mixing and matching flavors and coatings is part of the fun: If you love coffee, roll the centers in espresso rather than cocoa powder. Want a hint of mint? Make the centers out of white chocolate and add creme de menthe to the cream.

In cooking, as in love, it pays to follow your heart. It won’t hurt to experiment, and that way, you can give your Valentine what he or she really wants – chocolate, of course.