Chocolate Truffles Recipes…Easy!

With three versions of this easy chocolate truffles recipe, your chocolate dessert buffet will be gorgeously filled to the brim. With a few tweaks, the same recipe can be used to create distinctly different chocolate truffle desserts and a will put a plethora of possibilities up your hostessing sleeve! Master a few easy chocolate handling techniques, and you’ll open the door to a gazillion possibilities from coating luscious cakes to creating these delectable delights.

Classic Chocolate truffles recipe

If you’ve never made chocolate truffles before, they may seem intimidating, but trust us when we say that once you have the basics down, it’s a snap. This chocolate truffles recipe and tutorial on truffle basics will give you all the details you need for making perfect chocolate truffles, every time.

Chocolate truffles on lollipop sticks

For this tray of chocolaty treats, we pushed a wooden lollipop stick into each chilled truffle before we dipped them in the chocolate coating. Go for gorgeous presentation with this cake pop kit, available in loads of pretty color combos, that makes it so easy to turn a few truffles into gorgeous chocolate party favors or display them on your chocolate dessert buffet.

Chocolate Truffle Recipe—Tiny Chocolate Almond Tarts

By adding a ¼ teaspoon of almond extract with the heavy cream in your chocolate ganache mixture, the very same truffle ingredients turn into a chocolate almond tart. Silky smooth chocolate ganache tops a simple shortbread cookie crust.

Easy shortbread cookie crust:

2 cups of crushed shortbread cookies
¼ cup melted butter

• Combine melted butter with crushed cookies.
• Press the crust mixture into the bottoms of each well in a mini muffin baking pan. 
• Bake for 5 minutes at 375, or until lightly golden. 
• Let the crusts cool completely and then pour the ganache mixture over each mini crust. Top each tiny tart with a toasted almond slice.

Spicy Chocolate Truffles

These truffles are kicked up a notch with the easy addition of some crushed Thai chilis. Add spice to suit your taste, and roll them in cocoa powder to finish these easy chocolate truffles.

One recipe… one entire chocolate dessert buffet! We love easy.

Gumdrop Recipe

This pomegranate gumdrop recipe is easy, but do follow the directions precisely. These chewy morsels are a favorite of kids, and with the elegant flavor of pomegranate, these gumdrops are a favorite of adults as well. They make a statement on this gorgeous dessert table.

Pomegranate Gumdrop Recipe:

2 cups sugar
2 cups light corn syrup
12 tablespoons pectin
1 ½ cups pomegranate juice (You can use any flavor of juice you like!)
1 teaspoon baking soda

Line a 9 x 11 inch baking pan, (or an adult size shoe box lid- works perfectly!) with foil, then spray generously with cooking spray.

In a heavy sauce pan, melt the sugar and corn syrup together, stirring constantly. Make an effort not to splash the sugar onto the sides of the pan to avoid crystals of sugar in your candy. If you do get it on the sides, carefully wash them down with a bit of water on a pastry brush.

Once the sugar is dissolved, attach a candy thermometer to the side of the pan, and cook over medium heat at a steady boil until it reaches “soft crack” stage without stirring. (280 degrees) Be careful… this is dangerously hot sugar!

While the sugar is boiling, in a separate pan, mix the pectin with the juice. Then, add the baking soda and cook over medium heat for 3 minutes.

When the sugar mixture has reached the soft crack stage, remove it from the heat and slowly pour the sugar mixture in a thin stream into the pectin mixture, stirring constantly. Cook over medium heat for 2 minutes more.

Pour the mixture into the prepared pan. Let it set for about 2 hours or until the gumdrop mixture is firm and cool.

Cut the gumdrops into ½ inch squares with a knife coated in cooking spray, and roll each piece in sugar.

New Year’s Desserts

Introducing New Year’s desserts for your gorgeous white and silver themed New Year’s desserts table…

This easy New Year’s desserts menu can be done with homemade, or purchased desserts. The idea is to keep it simply elegant, so you can enjoy the New Year’s party too! All of these desserts will store well, with exception of the cupcakes. So, either make your New Year’s desserts ahead of time… or buy them already done. You choose.

The New Year’s desserts menu:

* White chocolate cupcakes
* Cake pops
* Meringue tarts with plum glaze
* Snowflake sugar cookie trees
* Vanilla bean marshmallows
* Pomegranate gumdrops (recipe here!)

6 Stunning New Year’s desserts, here’s how to do it…

White chocolate cupcakes:

We picked up our cupcakes on the day of the party. Elegant and simple, with our desserts table set and ready to go, we just placed our desserts on the platters and were ready to party with the guests.

Cake pops:

These classy New Year’s desserts look like snowballs with the sprinkling of coarse sugar. We displayed them in Sheer Elegance Sweet Petites, the new cake pop kit by Confetti Couture. The cake pops were super simple using this cake pop maker, so we created our own. They are bite sized cake balls on a lollipop stick! Dipped in white chocolate, they are deliciously coordinated.

Meringue tarts:

Take the elegance to new heights with these frothy egg whites slow baked to perfection and filled with a sweet and tart fruity glaze.

Snowflake sugar cookies:

We created these beauties ourselves, too. Gorgeous stacks of white snowflakes create pretty snow covered “trees” on our New Year’s desserts table. Sugar cookies freeze well, so you can make them far in advance, and even frost them, too. Just pull them out a couple hours before your New Year’s party and let them thaw unwrapped.

Marshmallows:

The marshmallows are also homemade on our New Year’s desserts table. They are truly, so easy to make. They can be bought this way, too. We used Sweet Stickz, wooden lollipop sticks from Confetti Couture, to display them.

Pomegranate Gumdrops (see the recipe here):

Of course, you could buy these, but we wanted to have perfectly fresh, elegantly flavored pomegranate gumdrops! So, we made these, too. Yes, we are a teensy bit particular about the details on our New Year’s desserts display!

Use our New Year’s Desserts table photo as a guide for setting your platters and filling them…