Post from the past!
Caramel truffles sounded like a very good idea. As a matter of fact, I fixated on these for quite some time (since August 14th, to be specific, when I had the idea after we went out for our anniversary dinner). I first came up with the idea for Bananas Foster truffles - white chocolate or vanilla shells, flavored with banana and rum, encasing caramel. This expanded slightly to include the idea for candy apple truffles - in which the shell would be apple flavored.
I did my research online and found a recipe for a caramel sauce. This sounds perfect! I thought to myself - a sauce should be liquidy enough to make a filling, right? Also, this would mean making the entire thing from scratch instead of purchasing some caramels and putting them inside my shells (another option I had thought of) which felt a bit like cheating.
So, I went ahead and got out my candy-making supplies for the first time here in Ohio. I heated up the candy melts that I had purchased for this task (a bag of white and a bag of green vanilla chips) in their respective bowls and added the flavoring until I was satisfied (the banana ended up with approximately 2 tbsp 99 bananas and 1 tsp rum, the apple with 1 tbsp 99 apples) and then microwaved them again for about 30 seconds to bake off some of the alcohol. I did a little taste test - perfect! So I filled the molds and waited for the shells to harden. While that was happening, I made my caramel sauce.
I used this recipe from rouxbe - an excellent instructional cooking website. I followed the recipe exactly and was extremely pleased when the caramel sauce came out that beautiful slightly reddish brown color that meant I had neither burnt it nor had a trouble with crystallization. I carefully poured the sauce from the pan into one of my candy bottles (those which look like the old-fashioned ketchup bottles from diners). This is when problem number one occurred. The bottle was too hot to touch! Luckily, it didn't seem like the caramel was melting the bottle (*whew!*) but it did mean that I couldn't hold the bottle and pour the sauce into the shells at this time. So, I thought, no big deal, I'll just wait a bit for the sauce to cool. After all, it's a sauce - I can let it cool all I want and it should still be gooey, right?
So I let it cool. A lot. But even after a significant amount of time (or, well, it felt significant. I have no way of knowing how much time actually passed - it felt like hours, but I'm horrid at waiting so it might have only been 30 minutes) the bottle was still like trying to juggle molten lava in your hand. So I put it in the fridge, thinking a quick trip to the cold box was just what it needed to reach handling temperature.
This seemed to work. After a bit more time I took the bottle from the fridge. It was still warm to the touch but no longer threatened multi-degree burns just from touching it so I was able to take the shells and fill them with the sauce. This is where things began getting tricky. After approximately 2 trays of shells had been filled (with 3 more still to go) the caramel began not wanting to leave the bottle. After a quick examination (by myself and my husband) it was noted that the caramel had cooled to the point where - while still not hard - it was far too gummy to exit the bottle through the convenient spout. Okay, well, ingenuity will rein! I got out a butter knife and began literally chiseling away at the caramel in the bottle. I'll be damned if some dessert sauce will get the best of me!
I painstakingly shoved the knife in-between the caramel and the bottle it was stubbornly sticking to. I removed the knife - now coated in the caramel - from the bottle and pulled pieces and chunks of caramel off of the knife, rolled them in my fingers and then pressed them into the shells. This took forever - and not just forever in the nebulous sense as above. This took hours - just to fill 3 trays! This is when that lovely stubbornness came in handy. Again, I will not be defeated by a dessert!
After I got done with this, I remelted the bowls of shell chocolate, put backs on the candies over the caramel, and left them in the fridge to harden. After another hour or so the backs were hard enough that I could pop them out (I had a similar yield as I usually do - about 90% - with the rest being stuck in some fashion to the mold) and they got their taste run.
All the work was voted worth it. These candies were incredibly tasty and accurately mimicked the tastes I was going for. However, I don't think I'll go through all this trouble again. I think that next time, I'll make the chips with the flavor as solid candies and drizzle caramel on the top of them. Or cheat and buy little caramels from the store and just put them in my shells. All-in-all, a Learning Experience.
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