Is That A Hazelnut Glaze In Your Eyes Or Are Your Just Happy To See Me?

Recycling? Me? 😉 Trust me though, this is the kind of recycling even the most notorious climate change denier can get behind. Remember last week when we made those peanut butter sandwich cookies with the chocolate hazelnut spread? Yeah, they were gone so fast that they’re barely a twinkle in my eye still either. Fear not however, because if you actually made them and followed my instructions, you likely also ended up with some knock-off Nutella leftover. I sincerely hope that you did not decide to be a crazy person and just throw it out though. That would just be a crying crying shame. Instead, you can do what I did which was turn them into magical truffles. But unlike the magic beans of Jack and the Beanstalk fame, your mama likely won’t be furious with angry rage at you for having traded the last of your worldly goods for them….ok, that’s probably not true. Luckily however, you don’t need to pay a badgillion dollars and endanger your family’s future welfare to partake in these babies.

You may or may not remember me mentioning how I’d made the spread thicker than your traditional Nutella because I wanted it to hold it’s shape in the cookies and not go oozing out all over the place at any temperature less than super refrigerated. Side benefit of this was that they were essentially the perfect ganache-like consistency. Now I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word “ganache”, it immediately conjures up images of smooth velvety truffles dancing in my head. What better way to use up leftover Nutella knock-off sandwich cookie spread then to create delicious spheres of awesome?

Now I’ll admit that part of the creation of these came from laziness, but also genius. I started thinking about how I didn’t really feel like tempering chocolate, but I also wanted these to have a coating that would be reasonably solid at room temperature. This in turn reminded me of these snowball cookies that I make which I dip in an icing sugar-amaretto glaze before coating in toasted coconut. Why couldn’t I just do something similar for these truffles? I started googling “glaze coated truffles” to see if anyone could tell me a reason why I shouldn’t be doing this (because I apparently care what the webisphere thinks of me). Guess what I found? Nothing, that’s what. I did not manage to find even one mention of anybody dipping truffles in glaze before rolling them in the coatings of their choice. The closest thing I could find was people dipping cake balls in glaze first. Cake ≠ Truffles (in case there was any confusion on that one). Could it be? Could I have thought of something that my 2 minutes of research “proved” that no one had thought of before? This definitely needed to happen now. Replace Amaretto with Frangelico, and these glaze-coated chocolate-hazelnut truffles were born.

I only did a thin layer of the glaze (because obviously it’s pretty sweet and I didn’t want it to be overkill), and  could not have been happier with how these turned out. Lesson learned this week? If anyone ever tries to tell you that there’s no glazing in truffle making, feel free to dump a bucket of glaze over their head and shove them into a pit of red ants….or you could just give them one of these truffles (that might also change their minds 😉 ).