If you are a fan of cooking at home then you must watch Masterchef. It’s a great competition show hosted by Gordon Ramsay, Graham Elliot and the always delightful Joe Bastianich.  All of the contestants are home cooks! They aren’t head chefs at 5 star restaurants. Most of them have jobs completely unrelated to the food industry.

Every week, they are asked to make something of the judges choosing in a limited time frame and without any recipes or direction. I’m always amazed at how well they do. Even if they say they’ve “never made this before”, they somehow throw it together. A couple of weeks ago, they were asked to make truffles. I made truffles once before but they seemed so scary that I ended up finding and using a “5-minute” recipe. I thought they were okay but I never made them again. After watching the show, I just had to try again (not with a 5-minutes recipe). I really impressed myself…which isn’t hard to do.

Truffles are basically a ganache, coated in chocolate and then sometimes rolled in nuts, or toffee, or sprinkles, or…well, the possibilities are endless. I think the hardest part about making truffles is coating them in chocolate. Working with chocolate is not my favorite thing. I’ve read about tempering chocolate so many times but it just seems so intimidating. I decided to go about coating my truffles the easiest way possible: chocolate in the microwave. What would I do without a microwave? I still wish I could have gotten the chocolate a little thinner so the excess ran off the truffles but I think they look pretty good. What do you think? Oh, yeah and they taste amazing! 

I used mostly bittersweet chocolate with a small portion of semi-sweet. They aren’t overly sweet but they are definitely rich and decadent. I coated some in cocoa powder, some in dark chocolate and some in peanut butter coating! PB is by far my favorite.

P.S. I’d love to hear any tips you have for me on melting chocolate! Help me!!