Manda and Mike: November Dinner Club

I have a couple recipes up my sleeve to share, but I must show you our good eats from November dinner club first. We were in charge of dessert this month which is a nice break for Mikey since he takes care of the duty whenever we have to bring appetizer or host with the entree. I love to bake!! Erin & Frank (the hosts) sent their menu out ahead of time and it sounded like a lot of food. So, I wanted to keep dessert pretty minimal.
I decided to make truffles.
I asked Mikey what flavors we should make and he suggested 3: coconut, macadamia nut and peanut butter (big surprise).
I got all 3 "flavorings" at the Coop. They have dried coconut and macadamia nuts in the bulk aisle. It was very economical to select just the amount that we needed:

I had the idea to toast the coconut and nuts on a sheet pan but Mikey suggested (and confirmed with the Coop baker) that toasting them in a saute pan would be a better idea. So, I roughly chopped the nuts and separated out the coconut:

The key to toasting nuts is to let the pan heat up ahead of time. So, I let it heat up for a good 5 minutes and then the toasting only took about a minute. I did the nuts and coconut separately and wiped the pan out with a paper towel between each one. Unfortunately, once the nuts cooled and I tasted them, I realized they needed to be toasted some more. So, I fired the pan up again for a solid 5 and toasted for another minute or so.

Next, I got to work on making the ganache filling. It consisted of
8 oz chocolate
1/2 c. heavy whipping cream
2 Tbsp. unsalted butter
1 Tbsp. light corn syrup (I did my homework to see if I could substitute honey or brown rice syrup for this and it turns out that only light corn syrup will do. It comes down to the chemistry of the sugar molecule in corn syrup and it's amazing binding abilities. Yep, total nerdom.)
*Recipe is courtesy of Cooks Illustrated

First, you melt the chocolate using the double boiler method (photo towards the end of the post because there is more melted chocolate required, muhahaha....)

Then in a separate pan you bring the cream, butter & corn syrup just to a strong simmer (about 160 degrees). Remove the pan from the heat and let it sit for 5 minutes. It'll look really weird at this point and you might think you haven't boiled it long enough (I was worried):

Then, you whisk the creamy sauce into the melted chocolate. It will look divine now and all your worries will have gone away. You need to pop the mixture into the fridge to bring it down to 80 degrees. The recipe said this would take 15-20 minutes but mine took a good hour.
Next, I put the chilled mixture in the Kitchenaid mixer bowl and whipped it on medium speed until it became the consistency of store-bought canned chocolate frosting (per the instructions).
At this point, the "dough" was still pretty soft, so I threw the bowl back in the fridge long enough to be able to roll the dough into little balls:

And here is how they turned out:

It was now 10:30pm and I was spent so I put them in the fridge (in a sealed container so they wouldn't dry out) until I could add the finishing touches.
A couple days later, I got around to adding the coatings: perfectly toasted coconut, finely chopped macadamia nuts (they chopped really easily after being toasted) and peanut butter:

More chocolate melting ensued (another 8 oz) via double boiler:

A third of the ganache balls were rolled in slightly warmed peanut butter (our fave- Maranatha p.b. is just peanuts and salt; no added sugar) and then popped in the freezer:

Finally, all the ganache balls were coated in melted chocolate. One third were rolled in coconut and another third were rolled in mac nuts:

I like to call these Rustic Truffles. There's no perfectly shaped ones but it didn't really matter because they all tasted wonderful.

So, on to dinner club we went. Bruce & Nellie brought the appetizer which was homemade cheese crackers and a cheese dip:

Dinner started with an amazing salad of spring mix, stilton blue cheese, red onions, re-constituted dried cherries, candied walnuts and a balsamic dressing (this was my favorite dish of the night):

I love Frank & Erin's style. Water was served in mason jars and the dressing was served in this adorable stainless cup:

Next, I helped myself to two sweet potato biscuits:

The main course was this apple, pear & goat cheese gratin:

and pistachio encrusted pork tenderloin with a pumpkin sauce drizzled on top:

This was totally my kind of meal! I loved everything about it!! The meal had lots of my favorite foods. My only regret is that I didn't bring the nice DSLR. My lil' point n shoot is handy but the picture quality is sub-par.

For dessert, we made little packages with 3 truffles in each box (one of each flavor) for each person: