Baci

I came across "Baci's" a few years ago when I was working in an Italian restaurant in Dublin. They are wonderful little chocolates individually wrapped in blue and silver foil. Basically it is milk chocolate and hazelnut truffle, but the fast that each one of them also has a little toasted hazelnut on top as well as being dipped in dark chocolate just makes them divine. During my holiday in Italy last year I found them again and could not have been happier.
I have a book called "The Chocolate factory" (straight transalation from Swedish) and it is full of delicious chocolate recipes. I have my own kind of basic recipe for ganache/truffle but in this book I gladly found a brilliant recipe for milk chocolate truffles so in December 2010 I combined this recipe with the idea of Baci's and voila!

100 grams milk chocolate
50 grams butter, room temperature
50 grams icing sugar
50 grams hazelnuts, toasted and peeled

100 grams dark chocolate

Finely chop the hazelnut, it needs to be nearly like powder, leave 7 nuts whole. Melt chocolate in a bain marie, let it reach 35C but not more. Set a side. Beat butter and icing sugar until white and fluffy, slowly add chocolate while still beating. Last fold in haelnuts. With a piping bag pipe 14 small truffles on a tray lined with baking parchment. Chop each whole hazelnut in half and put one half on top of each truffle, let set in the fridge for 1h.

Temperate the dark chocolate and dip each truffle in the chocolate with help of a fork and spoon. Let chill again before serving or wrapping.

While making the Baci's I recalled having seen a bottle of home made Wild Strawberry liquor in the fridge that I wanted to use in desserts (dont really like drinking it on its own). Now strawberry and milk chocolate is for me always going to be a success so truffles I made. Same recipe as for the Baci's but instead of hazelnut I used 25ml of liqour. Dipped in dark chocolate and decorated with some icing colored red they turned out to be delicious!