Taking your fillings for a dip in your favorite chocolate is the finishing touch. To get started, give the following recipe a try:
- 1 Stick butter
- 4 oz cream cheese
- 1 teaspoon real vanilla extract
- 1 lb confectioner's sugar (you may need a bit more)
- 1/2 cup chopped nuts, coconut, finely chopped dried fruit, (optional)
- 6 oz good quality chocolate either Milk or Dark
Mix softened butter, cream cheese, vanilla and sugar together until smooth and uniform. Add in an optional ingredients for variety. Toasted chopped pecans, shredded coconut, and chopped dried pineapple are a few ideas. Mix in enough to suit your own tastes.
Prepare to temper your choice of chocolate. Some recipes call for paraffin wax. This is such a shame, because properly tempered chocolate will be firm enough and glossy without the need for wax. Who wants to eat wax anyway?
For a truly professional look, use a dipping fork for dipping in tempered chocolate. The best one for round bon bons is one that looks like a spiral wired spoon.
Shape 1 oz portions of your filling into little balls, and place them on a cookie sheet. Put the sheets into the refrigerator until the balls have become firm. Remove only enough to dip within a short period of time. If the balls become mushy while you are working, you'll have to replace them in the refrigerator.
Once the chocolate is tempered and the balls are firm, dip them into the chocolate with your dipping fork. Allow excess to drip off, and drop gently onto parchment paper. Repeat until all balls are coated.
If you do different flavors of filling, you may want to mark your cookie sheets, so you don't mix them together. They'll be very hard to tell apart after they are coated. You could garnish each one with a hint(like a sprinkling of plain coconut) of its filling as a way to differentiate between them before the chocolate has set.
