I’ve always appreciated homemade presents.  It shows that someone put effort, care, and time into creating something special for me.  During Christmas time, I like giving homemade presents, and I usually have a lot of ambitious ideas.  But going into sweatshop mode from November (or even earlier) to December can be pretty stressful.  Over the years, I’ve been experimenting with fun projects that are also fairly easy to make, especially since time is so limited with a little kid around.

A couple of years ago, I made Minion ornaments for my friends’ kids.  It was fun, but filling the plastic balls with yellow paint was a bigger pain than I expected.  I messed up several, so I couldn’t give away as many as I wanted.

Another year, I made jars of homemade hot chocolate mix.  That was an easy present to prepare.  I used Alton Brown’s recipe and made several large batches to fill a bunch of jars.

This year I decided to venture into the world of confections.  I will not pretend to know much about making candy.  In fact, I was quite nervous since making candy requires a lot of attention to details, and it’s harder to recover from any screw ups in the process.  In the past, I’ve made truffles and peppermint bark…and I had a 50/50 success rate haha.  But I decided to give it a shot and make dark chocolate truffles and soft caramels.

I searched for various truffle recipes, and I decided to use Ree Drummond’s truffle recipe.  She has a great step by step photo tutorial, so check it out.

The truffles were not difficult to make.  I got a can of condensed milk, vanilla extract, 8 oz of semi-sweet chocolate, and 8 oz of dark chocolate.  That will be for the soft ganache interior.  For the hard chocolate shell, I got more dark chocolate, in the form of chips.

I used the double boiler method to melt the chocolate.  Basically I put a small amount of water in the pot, place a glass heat proof bowl over the pot.  Heat the water and keep it on a simmer.  The steam melts the chocolate in the glass bowl.  I melted the 4 bars of chocolate and can of condensed milk.

Mmmm, it’s coming together.

Here is the big blob of melted chocolate and condensed milk.  Stir in 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract.  The vanilla will make the chocolate blob glossy looking.  It kind of looks and feels like a huge wad of melted Tootsie Roll.

I covered the bowl up and put it in the fridge for about 2 hours until the ganache hardened, but was still soft enough to scoop and form into balls.  I used a melon baller to scoop out little balls.  I also used exam gloves so I didn’t make a mess of melted chocolate.

Here is a tray of what looks like large rabbit poop.  At this point, you can roll the ganache balls in various toppings, and be done with it.  But I wanted to cover them with a hard chocolate shell.  Ree Drummond used milk chocolate for her coating, but I had a bag of dark chocolate on hand, so I used that.

I melted 2 cups of dark chocolate chips in the double boiler.

Then I dropped the ganache balls in the melted chocolate, rolled them around, and fished them out with a fork.

While the chocolate was still wet, I sprinkled some of the balls with sea salt, chocolate sprinkles, and Christmas sprinkles.  Making the balls bite sized gave me around 70 truffles.  I stuck the trays in the fridge to harden, and then I transferred them to a container.  They will keep for weeks in the fridge, but they should be brought to room temperature before serving.

Now on to the tricky caramels.  I finally bought myself a candy thermometer, which can also be used for deep frying (yay!), so I wanted to break in the thermometer.

I looked at various caramel recipes, and decided to try the Kitchn’s soft and chewy caramels.  If you are interested in making the caramels, read the instructions closely.  The Kitchn has a good guide with photos.  It’s not a difficult process, but it does require close attention.  Like I mentioned earlier, I have very little candy making experience and knowledge.  I followed the recipe as closely as I could, although my first batch says otherwise.  My first batch turned out to be a caramel sauce, even after a night in the fridge.  It tasted ridiculously good, but it’s not what I had in mind.  So after some cursing and reviewing the recipe, I made a second batch.

This is my heavy cream, butter, and salt warming and melting in the small saucepan.

Here is the corn syrup, white sugar, and water bubbling away.

Here is the candy mixture after I added the warm cream, butter, and salt.

I poured the finished mixture into a 7×11 glass dish with a greased piece of parchment paper.

After cooling and hardening for most of the day, I was pleased to see a solid block, instead of a dish of mush.  The caramels were still a lot softer than I wanted, but they tasted super delicious, all buttery, sweet, and melt in your mouth.  If I attempt another batch, I’ll have to see if I can make them a little firmer.

I cut them into little bite sized squares, and wrapped them into squares of wax paper.  I ended up with around 70 squares of caramel.

I ordered a pack of 24 little boxes from Amazon for the candies.  The boxes were a perfect size for 4 truffles and 6 caramels.  More could be crammed in, but I was going for a nice presentation.

One reviewer on Amazon decorated her box like snowmen, and I thought it was a cute idea.  Of course a classic gold ribbon is also elegant and easy to do.

I am not going to write recipes for the truffles and caramels.  I followed the original recipes very closely, so check out Ree Drummond and The Kitchn for their recipe and guides.  Maybe in a few years, I will have more experience to try experimenting with my own candy recipes, but for now…I’m done.  Happy holiday crafting!