coconut truffles - my hatred for sweetened condensed milk overrides anything else

Being that I had half a can of sweetened condensed milk sitting in my fridge (eew) from the magic 7 layer bars, I needed to find some use for it pronto. Personally, sweetened condensed milk disgusts me- The mere image of the thick cream-colored goop disgusts me. Sure, it comes out great in recipes (because you can't taste it or see it), but other than that, please get that gooey sappy syrup away from me. Okay, I'm done with my little rant... Anyways, I also still had candy coating leftover from the valentine's day truffles, so I figured I'd do an all-inclusive clean out of random ingredients in my baking drawer.


Coconut truffles were the plan, and I found a basic recipe online for which I would somewhat follow.


I toasted half the coconut, and left the other half untoasted (as suggested in the recipe). The shredded coconut was mixed with the condensed milk (yes, by hand- eew).


The recipe used powdered sugar and crushed graham cracker crumbs to make up the rest of the mixture. I thought that was pretty ingenious- because the balls would have been too sticky and way too sweet to eat just as is.


I rolled out my little mini balls on parchment paper and put them in the fridge to firm up.


Time for a taste test. Yep- pretty good. (These were nothing like the other truffles I made though.) The main thing was that I knew my little sweet-toothed-boy would enjoy these.


The first batch I decorated were completely dunked in white candy coating, and then sprinkled with a little leftover coconut. Fancy shmancy much?


Once I realized my white dipping chocolate was diminishing, I decided to dip only half of the truffle but pack on the coconut into the remaining exterior.


If you love coconut and you love sweet things, these are the truffles for you (a.k.a. the perfect definition of my boyfriend). I mean, besides the fact that I did only eat about 20 of these, I wasn't fully satisfied with them- I guess I would say they were a little too dry for me.


I think they needed to be a little more moist (Dare I say... add more sweetened condensed milk?) Yuck, I think I'd rather have them on the drier side then, thanks.

---RECIPE---
Adapted from The Kitchn.

note:
These "Creamy Lime & Coconut Truffle Bites" make about 200 truffles. I cut the recipe in fourths, and added/subtracted amounts depending on the consistency of my mixture.

ingredients:
12 cups shredded coconut, divided
2 14-ounce cans sweetened condensed milk
2 teaspoons vanilla
3 limes, zested and juiced (omitted)
1 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs
2 pounds confectioners' sugar

directions:
1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Spread 6 cups coconut on a baking sheet and bake for 7-10 minutes or until lightly toasted. Stir the coconut several times to keep it from burning. Remove the coconut when toasty brown and slightly crispy.
2. In the bowl of a stand mixer, stir together the remaining 6 cups untoasted coconut, sweetened condensed milk, vanilla, lime juice, lime zest and graham cracker crumbs. Beat until well mixed. Slowly add the confectioners' sugar and stir until well-mixed. Refrigerate for at least one hour.
3. Scoop the mix out with a teaspoon and roll each lump in a ball, then roll in the toasted coconut. Place on a wax-paper-lined cookie sheet and freeze for at least an hour or two before serving.

amount:
Makes about 200 truffles.

valentine's day - truffles - the perfect way to use up old/hard cookies

After the Super Bowl, I had a few tupperwares left of the excess brownies and chocolate chip cookies. Remember how I cut them into cute little football shapes and whatnot.. Well you may be wondering as to what I did with those odd shaped crumbs. (No, I did not eat them... well, I ate a good amount, but definitely not all of it). I sneakily hid them, to be saved for a later purpose (a.k.a. now). My boyfriend actually caught me... He came across one of these tupperwares and was like "Are those mine?"... lol, what kind of creature have I created! Just because I have baked goods, doesn't automatically mean they are yours! (Well, they indeed were for him, he just didn't know it at the time.)


I only had time to do the neiman marcus cookie crumbs and the blondie crumbs before Valentine's Day (the brownies were to come later). I also bought this cute little container and mini muffin liners for each truffle, to go with the whole gay pink/red theme.


The ones with red candy coating and powdered sugar had the neiman marcus cookie pieces. For that batch, I placed all the excess cookies into the food processor, and dumped some vanilla frosting inside. I'm not sure how much frosting I used, as it depended on how much was needed to make it moist enough.


Then I placed the mushy cookie mixture in the fridge to harden up. Once it was at the point where I could roll them into tight balls, I dipped them in the red coating and immediately sprinkled powdered sugar over them.


They weren't that good to be quite honest. The canned frosting tasted horrible and I was pretty disappointed that the rest of the batches wouldn't come out as good either.


I decided that for the blondies batch I'd use some leftover caramel butter frosting (from the caramel cupcakes) and mix it together.


As for decorating them, I first dipped them in the white candy coating and them dribbled the red coating back and forth. These definitely looked a lot better.


Mmm, these tasted a lot better too. It was probably because I used the frosting, but also because the blondie crumbs were a lot better tasting in the first place. Each little truffle had chopped nuts and small flecks of coconut. These white truffles were eaten up a lot faster than the red ones.

---RECIPE---
Made by myself

ingredients:
any leftover cookie/blondie/brownie crumbs
frosting or something similar
candy coating

directions:
1. Place cookie crumbs in food processor and pulse until tiny crumbs.
2. Slowly add frosting and mix. If it needs more moisture, then keep adding frosting until the batter had clumped until into a single ball.
3. Refrigerate until hard enough to roll into little balls, and then refrigerate the balls on a cookie sheet.
4. Roll into candy coating however desired.

horrible sugar cookies = experimentation

'Twas a Friday... so I baked! I figured I'd bake cookies for my roommate who's birthday had just passed (I felt the chocolate cake just didn't do it for me). She loves sugar cookies, and I was just tempted to try my first rolling-cookies experience, so sugar cookies it was!

When looking for recipes, I always turn to Google. I typed "soft sugar cookie recipe" and chose one at random. BIG MISTAKE. Let's just skip to the bad stuff because quite honestly I'm so angry. These cookies came out cakey and mushy and just plain horrible. I felt bad so I decided to make the best of it and fiddle around with these pieces of crap.



First I chose to frost them with frosting (seeing as how these were basically like slices of cake anyways). I then drizzled chocolate (to get rid of that crappy cake taste) and make fancy-shmancy decorations. I figured the more fancy it looked, the better it would taste- Not really.



After baking the first few batches of those large cookies, I noticed something was wrong with them. Attempting to fix my cookies mid-way, I used tiny cookie cutters to hopefully make them not as cakey. Didn't really help- they were just smaller pieces of cakey dough. I played around with these and dipped one side in royal icing and the other in chocolate. They were actually okay tasting, but nothing special. They more so just look cute.



This was the more successful of the bunch. I got so fed up that I crushed the remaining cookies into little cookie crumbs. I then added buttercream frosting, just enough to make sticky balls with. These little balls were rolled in melted chocolate and topped off with powdered sugar. And voila, there you have mock-truffles! These actually tasted good- well anything tastes good to me if chocolate's involved.

Needless to say, I hated this day and I hated these damned cookies.

---RECIPE---
I'm not even going to post this horrible recipe. I don't want this misfortune to happen to anyone else.