My First Daring Bakers' Challenge

The August 2011 Daring Bakers’ Challenge was hosted by Lisa of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drive and Mandy of What the Fruitcake?!. These two sugar mavens challenged us to make sinfully delicious candies! This was a special challenge for the Daring Bakers because the good folks at http://www.chocoley.com offered an amazing prize for the winner of the most creative and delicious candy!

This was my first Daring Bakers' challenge and I was excited. I would have rather baked something, but making chocolates was fun, too. For my two candies I did two different types of truffles. Both were dipped truffles, one is a Hazelnut Coffee Truffle (Frangelico liqueur and instant espresso on the inside, and rolled in crushed chocolate covered coffee beans) and the other is an Amaretto Truffle (Amaretto liqueur and rolled in toasted, chopped almonds). 

The main challenge of the challenge was tempering chocolate. This ended up being difficult for me because I didn't have an appropriate thermometer. I'm sure my tempering technique wasn't perfect, but after dipping the truffles in the tempered chocolate I rolled them in the toppings so any imperfections were hidden =) Here's how they turned out:

I like the Amaretto Truffles the most because I really like the Amaretto and almond flavor. Also, with the Hazelnut Coffee Truffles I used instant espresso, which I think made the chocolate bitter (and I wasn't using a very sweet chocolate to begin with).

Overall, I liked doing this challenge and I'm looking forward to having something new to try every month.