Chocolate Truffles
For the Holidays
I’ve been waiting for months to share these chocolate truffles with you. They are absolutely perfect for the holidays — luxurious, and celebration-worthy.
As is so often the case with food history, who created truffles first has several origin stories.
One legend is that patissier Louis Dufour created them for Christmas Day in 1885. Another is that Auguste Escoffier was responsible for their creation when his apprentice made a mistake and poured hot cream over chocolate.
Link: Origin of Chocolate Truffles
Link: History of Chocolate Truffles
These Baileys and Jameson Irish Whiskey Truffles, using premium dark and milk chocolate, are decadent and delicious. With creamy centers, a crunchy outer layer of chocolate and a velvety Valrhona cocoa coating, they are just the thing for this week and next. They were fun to make and the recipe worked flawlessly.
The author of the recipe is someone I ‘met’ last March. Cherie Denham was teaching a Zoom class from her home in Hampshire in the UK as part of a fundraiser for ‘Cook for Ukraine’ and she quickly became one of my favorite people to follow on Instagram.
A cook and baker, Cherie takes you step-by-step through the creation of these beauties in the Instagram reel linked below and the recipe is in the text of the post. (Note: I opted to make 12 very large truffles, but the recipe makes up to 40 small truffles.)
Recipe Link:
Baileys and Irish Whiskey Truffles
If you’d like a version without alcohol, Cherie suggests using 1 teaspoon of espresso powder (add to cream that will be heated) and 2 teaspoons of vanilla extract to the chocolate ganache mixture. I hope you’ll make them, they are just so good!
Thank you, Cherie!
Till Next Year
This is the final edition of TTK for 2022 and I want to thank each and every one of you for being here and sharing that most precious commodity — your time — with me.
I’m off for the holidays and a bit after, but will see you again January 13.
I’ll be thinking about 2023 Time Travel editions and tales of kitchen lore that will take us (the now close to 2,000 readers of this publication) down new, surprising and hopefully delightful rabbit holes in the New Year.
And I will begin by answering the question: “Why WAS Alice holding Orange Marmalade as she tumbled down?”
Again, many thanks for being here. See you in January! Happy Holidays! ✨
Jolene
These look amazing.
In my house truffles are a far humbler creature - involving a lot of crushed digestive biscuits (Graham crackers maybe?), condensed milk and desiccated coconut. I assume double cream was still hard to get hold of when my grandma was raising my mum and aunt after WW2 in Scotland, and the fun of crushing biscuits has meant we still make the post war version. In fact it was one of the things I bonded with the man I married over - his mum's "coconut balls" are my grandma's "truffles."
Have a fun holiday, Jolene! And a Happy and Healthy 2023! Will look forward to your newsletter in the new year❤️