~ Easy dessert for the cooking challenged (like me!)

Truffles are one of my fail-safes…they’re really easy to make and I always have good results.  –> very happy family/friends

So this Thanksgiving we had a family dinner with some second-cousins and their relatives.  So naturally I made some truffles as an easy surprise.  The only thing about truffles is there must be enough time left for cooling after melting the chocolate, and it is also fairly messy.  My first time I just made original; but my second time I tried making Nutella, raspberry, and mint truffles.  I decided to also try almonds and toffee this time, with pretty good results.

Ingredients:

2 cups chocolate chips

1/3 cup heavy cream

6 tablespoons butter

Cocoa powder

Optional:

-Toffee bits

-Peppermint extract

-Raspberry extract

-Almonds — chopped

-Nutella

1. Melt the chocolate
2. Mix in the heavy cream and butter. Optional: once everything is smoothly mixed and melted, you may add small amounts of the optional ingredients/extracts just to spice things up!  I didn’t measure the amount of each that I used, but I would say one teaspoon or less should be fine, for the extracts.  The toffee I just judged by looks; and the almonds I didn’t mix in–I saved for a later step.
3. Refrigerate until hardened.
4. Scoop out the chocolate and mash them into small balls.
5. Roll the balls in the cocoa powder (or chopped almonds).
6. Place in container…i.e. cup cake lining or whatever it’s called!

Should make ~30 truffles if you make them into approximately 1 inch balls.  (Got the recipe from my bag of Ghiradelli chocolate chips a while back, though they did not suggest the optional stuff ).

Here are some pics to demonstrate (& potentially evoke hunger..rawr!)

Scraped the chocolate from the bowl so it would be easy to collect into a ball.  This one had the toffee chunks.

Chop up almonds and have cocoa powder…ready to roll!

Toffee truffles sitting in cocoa powder =]…They’re super messy without the cocoa powder; and the bitterness of the powder prevents it from being too overwhelmingly sweet.  Actually the powder can be messy too, but not as bad as the uncovered chocolate goo.

Almond covered truffles!

Results: three boxes of truffles + some.

NOM NOM NOM!

I might actually make more because I have 2/3 cup of heavy cream left and I don’t want it to go to waste.  Or I guess I could make other stuff like pasta sauce.  Guess I’ll ruminate on that. =)

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a real update…Life has just been pretty busy.

School it self has been pretty rough this semester in that many of my exams/papers coincided with each other or fell on the same week; I guess that’s lucky of me that my other semesters were slightly better spread.  But lucky for me, an exam I was supposed to have tomorrow got moved to Tuesday (whew). 

But at the same time it has been somewhat relaxing since I don’t have lab reports to write since I don’t have any school-lab. 

I have, however, been involved in a research lab, which consumes about 15 hours a week.  It’s pretty exhausting–I mostly make cDNA from RNA extractions and I have also tried out a few RNA extraction protocols for my lab (see, there are usually kits with defined protocols; but the kits are really expensive, so my lab is hoping there’s a cheaper way to get the same results), and do dilutions in preparation for qPCR, which I don’t do (waaaay too expensive O_O). I find lab to be pretty interesting but very stressful, since I’m afraid to mess up their specimen, many of which were blood samples they collected all the way out in Kenya…the chemicals I use are also pretty expensive also, as are most things found in laboratories…

So a few interesting things that have occurred since my last serious updatesy post:
Went clubbing once with a few good friends:

[Us chilling after leaving]
It was far less awkward than the times I had gone before, though I can’t say clubbing is my cup of tea.  I wasn’t a fan of the music and I also didn’t care for the atmosphere (in both senses–the air was smokey and people were crazy?).

There was an Asian festival mixing some Indian elements with the Autumn Moon festival.

I didn’t completely understand what was going on; also, there were a lot of people there, so my friends and I decided to kind of venture outwards…

Adventures in our Marshall Student Center (pics not in chron order):

Adventures outside…

I also went skydiving!
 
It was pretty exciting, though I must admit, the feeling of jumping out of a plane wasn’t really a *completely* new feeling to me.  Long time ago at a leadership program back at home, they had us climb up a tall pole and jump off of it (attached to some cords).  It’s just a feeling of insanity and blankness.  Hard to describe.  Also, the thought of, “maybe I’m crazy?”.  Nonetheless, the weather was beautiful and I had fantastic company.

A while after that, I attended Garba with a ton of my friends…it was exciting as usual, though I was again quite a failure in dancing.  I hope one day I can dance without tripping on myself.  That would be optimal.

Then, there was this epic epic concert feature New Politics, Neon Trees, and 30 Second to Mars.  MTV was there too…it was probably one of the happiest shows I have been to, honestly.  I was so pumped about the music and the crowd was extremely enthusiatic.  It was also nice since I had a large group of friends that went with me.    And, it was free!  The performers were all extremely active too.  New Politics is probably one of my favorite bands…the lead even did head-stands on stage and was really vivacious.  The crowd was excited even though most of them didn’t know their music.

Ducking out of the sunlight (–> gave us half dark half light faces). 
My friend and I were hoarse from screaming the lyrics…

Then, there was Humans versus Zombies–a school wide game where it starts off with a few zombies and a lot of humans and you can stun zombies with socks…this year a little more than 1000 people played.  

I didn’t last 24 hours before becoming a zombie.  Cece and I were AMBUSHED.

z_z –> x_x

Then, we both became deceased because we failed to eat a human within 48 hours of being tagged.  During one of the days, I picked up my craaazy (=)) sister from the airport and got hang out for a small portion of the next day.

Then, there was Halloween!

Me and my roomie dressed as a variety of sushi (Nigirizushi) for one party, and a sailor + emo girl (her sister) for another one.

It’s the first time I’ve actually found an idea that I liked and went with it…usually I dress as something lame/easy (i.e. wear all balck and say I’m a witch).

I guess the final and most recent adventure was..my birthday!   My super epic friends sneakily planned a surprise get together complete with an amazing playlist and delicious cheesecake.  Everything was decorated nautical themed because the plan was to drink like sailors! 

Just kidding! :o)  Nah, nautical themed since my friends know me so well. ^^
(ocean = happy)

I’d like to write more but I’m getting tired ><.  I’m so lucky to have the friends I have.  Honestly, I can’t imagine finding better friends if I scoured the whole world.

Counting blessings since 1989 =).