Cookie Dough Truffles

When preparing for my cookie onslaught at Christmas, I found another Paula Deen recipe I wanted to make located in the Best Desserts magazine on page 82.  This recipe is for Cookie Dough Truffles and one look at the picture in the magazine was enough to entice me to make them.

When I sat down to write this blog post, I checked the Food Network site and found that the recipe for the Cookie Dough Truffles is listed so I don’t need to duplicate the recipe here.

When I reviewed the ingredients list, I found the requirement for 1.5 pounds of chocolate candy coating.  Neither my wife nor I had ever used a candy coating, but we remembered seeing it at several of the craft stores in the area, so we made a trip to purchase a couple of bags of Wilton chocolate flavor Candy Melts.

Making the cookie dough recipe was very easy and straightforward; mix all the ingredients following the directions.  Once the mixing was completed, I placed the bowl with the dough in the refrigerator for about an hour to chill.  Once the dough was firm, I used a spoon, gathered about one tablespoon of dough, and rolled it into a ball.  The balls were placed on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper.  Once I had a tray full of dough balls, I placed them back in the refrigerator to chill until I had completed rolling out all the dough.

Unsure about how to melt the Candy coating, I made a double boiler out of our Kitchen Aid mixer bowl set into a saucepan of boiling water.  I tried a variety of methods to get the dough balls evenly coated with the chocolate: handling with rubber gloves, spoons, etc.  I finally found that two forks seemed to work best.  I would drop the dough ball into the chocolate, roll it around with a fork and then using a fork in each hand, lift the coated dough ball out of the bowl and deposit it on the parchment paper.

This recipe makes about five dozen truffles, so it took me about thirty minutes to coat all the dough balls.  I had some trouble keeping the chocolate in the double boiler at the correct temperature, the chocolate would seemed to get shiny or very thick so I had to keep adjusting the temperature on the burner.  Once I completed a cookie sheet of truffles, I would place it back in the refrigerator to harden.  After about thirty minutes, I packed all the truffles for storage in some Tupperware containers with a layer of parchment paper between each layer.  One of the containers we placed in the freezer to remove the easy temptation to eat all the truffles.

We wondered what to do with the remaining chocolate coating, and my wife remembered we have some plastic candy molds in our attic.  While I finished coating all the truffles, she brought out the molds and got them ready for the chocolate.  We had a great time producing chocolate leafs, bunnies, and flowers in the molds.  Many of these molded chocolate items we used as decorations on other chocolate desserts (see Flourless Chocolate Cake).

The truffles were terrific and a big hit whenever I served them at the holidays.  I took the last two dozen to a New Years Eve party where they quickly disappeared.  This recipe is very easy to make and because it doesn’t require cooking, even young children could help make the dough.  One caution, it seems that everyone likes to sample the mini chocolate chips so be sure to have enough saved away for when you make the recipe.

Adventures In Food: Author: Kerry Howell