Valentines Day Truffle Box

Everyone loves getting a box of chocolates on Valentines Day and biting into each piece hoping its your favorite kind. They typically are the store-bought kind and I thought it would be a fun challenge to make an assorted box of truffles for Josh as my gift to him. This was my first time making truffles and I thought it would be creative to play with different flavors and make more than just a basic chocolate truffle. So I came up with these flavors: cookie dough, peanut butter [with a white chocolate base], chocolate strawberry, white chocolate raspberry, and chewy salted caramels. All dipped in chocolate of course& then decorated with all things red, pink, sparkly and heart shaped! 

cookie dough!

It isn't difficult to make these truffle, its just time consuming because there is much down time waiting for every step to set up and cool properly, which requires a great deal of patience. I would definitely give yourself at least a day in advance to make these.

Decorating these was the most fun part because  each truffle really is a blank canvas. They can be decorated for any holiday, with any design, and in any color- the possibilities are endless. The best part is- they do not have to be perfect because you want that homemade look.  Put your own little touches on these, they can be as personalized as you want. Pipping out the recipients initials on some of the chocolates adds a nice little touch.

I also found a cute red tin box and some adhesive glitter hearts that I used to present the chocolate in. Pink mini muffin papers were used to hold each truffle and a piece of pretty heart tissue paper was draped over the chocolates.

 

More pictures, recipes, and how-to's after the jump!

Girl Scout Cookies: Tagalongs Edition

It's girl scout cookie season and I can't wait to start seeing the little girls in front of supermarkets. I used to be a girl scout and remember selling them with my troop and dressing up in a giant cookie box.

I've already ordered my cookies but since I probably won't be receiving them for at least a few weeks I figured why not try and make my own? I've never thought to do that more and now when I'm craving some in 6 months I can just make my own!

These cookies are actually really simple to make, they just take a little time because you need to wait for the filing to set, and then the chocolate coating to set. I used a semi-sweet chocolate instead of the traditional milk chocolate to have a little balance between the sweet creamy peanut butter filling and the slightly bitter semi-sweet chocolate.

Experimented with white chocolate on a few, yum!

I'm going to dedicate the next few posts to recreating as many girl scout cookie recipes as I can. Next on my list, thin mints!