The . . . Baker's Apprentice?

A woman who is very special to me recently celebrated her 70th birthday, and I wanted to give her a very special present.  I consider her my surrogate grandmother, but don’t ever tell her that—her grandbabies are all toddlers, not pushing 30—she considers herself my surrogate mom.  We used to work together (she is now retired), we are in the same yoga class and Bunco group, and I helped her cross off three items from her Bucket List:  first tattoo (she got a teddy bear wearing a pink bowtie on her ankle), first ride on a Harley (of course), and first hot air balloon ride.  She was there for me when my grandma passed away, and I was there for her when her sister-in-law (and fellow Bunco player) passed. 

Since I can’t knit her a scarf or sew her a quilt, I made her food.  That’s my craft; that’s my skill; that’s the only thing I know how to create.  Plus, giving a perishable gift means that she won’t have just another piece of crap lying around her house that she had to make space for.  She is already the knick knack queen; the last thing she needs is . . . well, more things.  I don’t get to bake much—I’m not much of a sweets person and eating dessert isn’t helpful when I need to be in goalkeeper “beast mode”—it’s something I’m good at but would like to be better at, so I made homemade truffles. 
It’s not a difficult recipe, but it is time consuming and messy.  First you make a ganache of white chocolate, cream, and butter.  Let that set up on some parchment paper in the fridge for about an hour, then roll it into little balls, and let them set in the fridge for another hour.  Pretty easy so far, right? 

Now comes the tricky part. 

You melt some baker’s chocolate; I’ve found that I prefer the semi-sweet instead of the unsweetened kind, and that for this particular recipe melting it in the microwave 30 seconds at a time works better than using a double boiler.  This part can take a while, and the chocolate will just get lumpy faster the longer you have it sitting in the boiler. 

The recipe says to use 2 forks to dip the balls of ganache in the chocolate to coat them, but I found that this takes far too long, causes the chocolate to overcook, and you end up with more chocolate on the forks than on the ganache balls.  (Heheh . . . balls.)  So this time I decided to just try it using my hands, and maybe only coat half the balls and see what happened. 

After coating all of them halfway, I let them set on a rack and harden for a minute, and still had plenty of smooth melted chocolate left, so I attempted to coat the other half of the ganache.  This worked, to a certain extent.  When I pulled the hardened chocolate off the rack, some of it stayed on the rack, so I ended up having to try to coat more than half the balls, which inevitably led to my fingers getting coated in chocolate, meaning I left messy smudges on the already dried, hardened parts of the chocolate.  I ran out of the melted chocolate with about five half-coated balls left.  Which is fine, that was the point of coating them halfway first, so I wouldn’t run out of chocolate and be left with uncoated ganache. 

Now I needed to decorate them, and realized that sprinkles would only stick to the chocolate that was still partially melted, so I worked quickly and managed to get about 10 sprinkled.  The disadvantage of having to dry these on a rack meant that the grid pattern pressed into the chocolate.  However!  I bought icing for this very reason, and dotted little decorations over the grid marks.  (See?  Sometimes I’m not quite as dumb as I look.) 

Tasted one for quality control, put the rest in the fridge, and here’s the beautiful result:

 

Look!  Balls!