So anyway, back to the FOOD folder.
Amusingly, Foodie 5 in my previous post isn't a pizza at all. It's the Fried Chicken Strips starter from Domino Pizza. The real pizza is hiding behind the chicken strips box. Look carefully.

So anyway - again- this post is about my attempt at truffle-making.
As usual, I have NO idea where I got the recipe from. And I'm not going to pretend I'm an expert at truffle-making. This post definitely is not going to pretend to be a recipe.

Truffle-making...
Step 1: Boil some water, and draw a heart from the bubbles at the bottom of the pot.

Step 2: While the water is boiling, chop up beautiful blocks of chocolate.

Step 3: Put the finely chopped chocolate in a bowl and put the bowl into the boiling water. Hot water bath. Stir gently throughout. This is when your room smells divine. In case you're wondering, the bowl doesn't actually say 'lakes' - I know it looks like it, but it actually says 'Cow makes milk'. It does.

Step 4: Rescue the melted chocolate from the water bath. (This is where it gets a bit vague) Put in some ingredients, like vanilla essence, butter and stuff, and stir gently into the cooling bowl of chocolate. This is false. Because I clearly remember melting the butter and mixing the vanilla in a pan over the hob. But anyway, let us proceed. When we're happy, we put the bowl into the fridge, taking it out to stir every... (now there is some complicated instructions involved here, like for the first hour every 20 mins, then for the next half hour every 10 mins, or something like that - all I recall doing is noting down the time, then calculating the times when I have to go open the fridge and stir the mixture). So, anyway, u get a hardening ganache. It's NOT supposed to be grainy. One of my batches turned out weird.

Step 5: When the ganache turns reasonably hard i.e. they stay in shape, roll them into little balls. My first attempt took the instructions quite literally. I put a spoonful of ganache on my hand and rolled and got ... messy hands. Thing is... ganache is still pretty soft and melts at low temperature. So I just used a cooled spoon to nudge them into shape and plop them on a piece of baking paper. These are... artistic spheres.

Step 6: Put the ganache into the fridge to harden again, in preparation for their ordeal later. Make melted chocolate again - step 1 to step 3. Don't mix any weird stuff in it this time. Just take it off the hob to cool till it's like still liquid but not so hot. This potentially requires a thermometer to judge the correct timing to do it properly but I didn't have a thermometer so... when it looks kinda okay, and the ganache in the fridge is solid hard, spear the ganache quickly and dip it quickly in the melted chocolate and rescue it before the ganache dissolves in the chocolate. This is tricky I know. Cos imagine... if the ganache can melt in your hands, they MELT in the melting chocolate real fast. Then quickly plop the coated ganache onto baking paper and shove it back in the fridge.

Step 7: Look at them cool. Oh yes. I sprinkled some cocoa powder (or maybe icing sugar - forgot which) for some colour.

Step 8: EAT.

Thin chocolate crust with soft ganache that melts instantaneously. Mmmm.