Friday, December 09, 2011

Recipe 29: Goat Cheese-Honey-Pear Truffles

Almost Done
As bummed out as I am to miss out on partaking in Eat My Blog 4.0 (having volunteered for the previous three) due to a previously-planned excursion, I'm glad to at least be able to contribute something. Hopefully if you bought one of the Goat Cheese-Honey-Pear Truffles, you enjoyed eating them as much as I did making them.

And to let you in on a little secret . . . these impressive, intensely-flavored little gems are amazingly easy to make! Requiring only five ingredients and less than an hour of actual prepwork, I hope these treats make your gift-giving, or bakesale-contributing, repetoire!
Ingredients
Ingredients (for approximately 50 bite-sized truffles):
6 oz. creamy goat cheese (salted is OK, in fact, I rather like the tinge of savoriness!)
12 oz. bittersweet chocolate, chopped into chunks (I used Trader Joe's Pound-Plus bar)
2 Tbsp. honey
2 Tbsp. pear liqueur/brandy (I used Mathilde, leftover from my Autumnal Mulled Wine)
1/2 cup unsweetened powdered cocoa, sifted (if you don't like in-your-face bitterness of straight-on cocoa, you can sift in some powdered sugar too.)

Directions
Goat Cheese Mixture
1. Cream together the goat cheese, honey and pear liqueur until thoroughly incorporated (it will be kind of runny, that's OK)
Melting Chocolate
2. Over low heat of a stove and a watchful eye, melt the bittersweet chocolate chunks, stirring constantly to prevent burning (Tip: Be sure to the saucepan is completely devoid of water and that no water touches the melting chocolate, or you'll get a grainy seized mess!)
Ganache
3. Once chocolate is melted, pour gently over the goat cheese mixture and fold to incorporate; it will have the feel of a brownie batter.
4. Cover with plastic wrap and let it chill for at least 2 hours (I used that time to sift my cocoa powder, clean my cooking supplies and enjoyed a beer.)
Truffle Rolling
5. Take the chilled ganache of the fridge and use a spoon to pop out teaspoon-sized dollops, use your hands to mold them into sphere-ish truffles (the warmth from your palms and fingers will instantly make the ganache rather pliable), then roll in cocoa powder.
Rolled Truffles
6. Serve or store in fridge (I prefer eating them just a touch colder than room temp.)

3 comments:

lynn said...

sad i'll be missing out on "eat my blog" too. these look amazing!

oddlyme said...

This looks like it would taste like goat cheese fudge. Which is DIVINE.

Thanks for the recipe!

H. C. said...

@Actor's Diet, thanks

@OddlyMe, ha, yep--to really break it down, it's a basic ganache recipe with goat cheese instead of the usual heavy cream.

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