Cincaicook #3 - Oreo Truffles!

Last Saturday, our church organised a Lantern Festival celebration for the chinese community, and we were also encouraged to bring along some dishes for the potluck dinner... I told Alex that we should make some oreo truffles (that he once did for another church event before), and he entertained me, got me the recipe, and I went to get the ingredients from Countdown right after the English class in church. Well, there were some ugly fights in the kitchen when we were making it together but we definitely made up after that and had a rather nice evening together... SO, personal drama aside, here's the recipe for the truffles!

Before we start, make sure you would have at least 3 hours to do this before deciding that you wanna do this ... okay?

Let's look at the ingredients!

- 1 block of Philadelphia cream cheese.
- 2 blocks of dark chocolate of your choice
- 3 foils of oreos (roughly 450 gram of them)
- some chopped peanuts / almonds / any decorations you desire

Yup, sounds simple right.

Now let's go to the steps!

1. In batches, put your oreos into a ziplock bag, and use a roller to crush them into fine pieces and crumbs.

2. Put all the oreo crumbs in a large bowl or preferably your food processor, and mix them well with softened cream cheese. (The softer your cream cheese is, the easier it will be for you. Since we did not have a food processor, I had a challenging time using our hand blender, stopping every 20 seconds or so, dug out the sticky dough from the blender, mixed manually with my spoon, then used the blender again, and repeated the steps till I get a beautifully mixed dough.) This should be how it looks like..

 

3. Now, scoop the dough with a spoon and roll them into small balls. Make sure they are not too big because it will be too much of a bite after with the chocolate coating. With this recipe, you can comfortably make 40 - 50 balls.

4. Put the little balls into the freezer for 30 - 45 minutes.

5. Now comes the tricky part - melting the chocolate. Melting the chocolate is actually not as easy as it sounds (which I found out the hard way). Chocolate scorches easily.

There are 2 ways to melt chocolate.

If you want to use the microwave (which is faster), break the chocolate block into small pieces and put them in a microwaveable bowl. Now, set your microwave to the lowest heat for 30 - 45 seconds. Then take the chocolates out, give it a stir, and place it back into the microwave oven for 10 - 15 seconds, take them out, stir, and repeat the 10 - 15 seconds cycle till it's fully melted.

The second way is to place your chocolates (that are broken into smaller pieces) in a bowl, and place that bowl in a bigger pot that is filled with some water, and cook over the stove.Make sure that NO WATER gets into your chocolate or it will make your chocolate unusable. Watch over your chocolate, stirring it frequently, making sure the heat is not too high, till you are happy with the texture of it.

IF water did get into your chocolate (which happened to ours), it would not melt, but will clump... The way to save your chocolate is to add oil, stir it, add more oil, stir it, till it melts)

6. When your chocolate is fully melted, you have to act fast before it hardens. So use spoons, grab a ball, drop into the melted chocolate, coat it, and take it out, placing it on a non-stick foil or baking paper. Before the chocolate hardens, spread your decorations on it. Repeat this till you get all your balls coated.

7. Then, put them back into the freezer for an hour or so, and they are ready to be served :)

(since we were rushing, I actually did not have time to take a proper picture of the finished product and only remembered to do so after we presented the dish to the organising committee.. Being thick-skinned, I went back to snap a picture of it before rushing off lol. No time to do nice plating or take pictures of them in better angles hahahaha.)

Personally, I love how it tastes. Not too sweet at all because the dark chocolate balances out the sweetness of Oreo, and the cream cheese gives it a nice chewy texture. If you do try this, do show me the pictures of your creation ;)