I botched a batch of chocolate truffles. We were headed to dinner at my in-laws and I was bringing Mint Truffles for dessert. From the get-go these were destined for failure. I went to Whole Foods for the mint extract which they did not have so I opted for coffee flavoring, believing deeply that coffee and chocolate are the best of friends. Then I headed to the chocolate section and picked up nearly $20 of good chocolate. I mean, these were chocolate truffles and I wanted the good chocolate. In my mind, these were going to be divine, light, rich chocolate perfection.
So I headed back home and began to re-read the recipe more thoroughly only to find out that I need a good 3+ hours to do this correctly because of the cooling time of the chocolate. What!?!?! I only had two hours. No biggie, I told myself - I could do this. I was sure I could pull out a Macgyver in the kitchen. After all, I had salvaged tons of dishes in the past. I was armed with high quality chocolate and coffee flavoring - how bad could this go?
After about 2 and half hours of near meltdown in the kitchen, I finally admitted to myself that I am no kitchen Macgyver. I also learned to respect the process of truffle making. Long story short, in order to cool my chocolate mixture (the inside of the truffle) faster I stuck the whole lot of it in the freezer. The problem was that it cooled too much and too quickly and so I lost the light fluffy texture and was instead left with chunky, tough chocolate. I tried re-heating...too hot. I tried cooling again....too cool. I found the more I worked with the chocolate the more the oils separated from the chocolate making the texture just a bit off. The result was truffles that were decent in appearance but lacking in substance and flavor. And since the coffee flavoring ended up being all together undetectable (despite my using about 4 times what the bottle suggested), these had no depth of flavor. They were just too dense and fudgy to be considered truffles. I barely used a quarter of the chocolate mixture and gave up. We headed down to dinner with my in-laws, me with my tail between my legs.
A day later while lamenting in the car with the hubby about the leftover (roughly $15 worth!) chocolate in my fridge I decided there was no way I was wasting that chocolate. I needed to salvage it somehow - perhaps by adding it to some thing else. Could I bake it? Incorporate it into a brownie batter or cookie dough? Then, it hit me. Oreos - the king of all American cookies. Surely if I could somehow incorporate Oreos everything would be fine. Oreos fix everything. I would wrap the truffle chocolate around an Oreo and dip the whole thing in milk chocolate to create a lovely little shell.
We quickly picked up a package of Oreos and I got to work. And man, oh man were these good. Like stop your heart good. The fudgy botched chocolate needed the crunch of the Oreo to balance out its denseness and so together they were near chocolate perfection. I'm pretty sure I gained 12lbs and nearly gave myself a heart attack but it was well worth it.
Unfortunately I don't really have a recipe for this! Make some truffle chocolate (any recipe you like - I used this one), wrap it around an Oreo, dip it in milk chocolate candy coating (found at any grocery store). That's it. Use any truffle recipe you like - good chocolate, cheap chocolate, doesn't really matter since the Oreo really becomes the focus of these.
