Question
How do you coat perfectly round truffles with melted chocolate. Preferably with the least amount of mess. Normally, I just dip the truffle into a bowl of melted chocolate and remove the truffle with a spoon. I then will place them on a sheet of wax paper.
However, this leaves my truffles looking …well not so round. The chocolate drips down causing the truffle to have a flat surface. And the ball is not smooth.
The recipe I am following can be found here and an example is shown below:
Mint Oreo Chocolate Truffles
Answer
I don’t know about perfectly round, but you can do better.
Stick toothpicks in the truffles before dipping. Dip them using the toothpick, let it drip enough to make sure there’s not a ton of excess, probably while spinning it a bit to let it cool slightly and make sure it doesn’t all accumulate in one place. Then stab the other end of the toothpick into something to hold it with the truffle at the top. (A block of foam works, as does cardboard, though you might need to pre-poke holes.)
This avoids having a lot of excess coating chocolate, which it looks like you’re getting a lot of when scooping out with a spoon. There can still be a little excess, but it’ll drip down the toothpick, not get smeared all over. It also avoids having to mess up any of the surface by touching it with the spoon.
Beyond that, they’ll be as perfectly round as you managed to roll the centers, which is mostly just a matter of a bit of practice and obsessiveness. So they won’t be perfectly round, but they’ll be a lot smoother and rounder, definitely enough to impress people. You do get a small hole on one side of the truffle, possibly with a tiny bit of excess chocolate around it where it collected against the toothpick, but I don’t think that’s terribly ugly. Plus as long as a decent fraction are pretty, you can just eat your mistakes.
Here’s what a friend and I managed on our first try:
Truffles
As you can see, they’re definitely not perfect. But we got better at it as we went along. A lot of the irregularities are from initial inexperience, variation in chocolate temperature (we didn’t have a great water bath or hot plate setup), and simply not having terribly round centers.
Finally, you might want to practice tempering the chocolate a bit better. Having nice glossy smooth surface makes them look a lot cleaner even if they aren’t perfect.
Source: I asked this question on cooking.stackexchange.com
I Cook AND Code 
Delicious:-)
Brilliant idea, and it looks like it was executed well. I’d come to terms a while ago with the fact that my chocolate truffles would never be perfectly round, but rather than thinking of clever ways to address the problem, I decided to distract the recipient from their gloppiness and asymmetry with drawn on Asian emoticons:
Your method probably makes much more sense.
I like that they’re not perfectly round – gives them character 😉
True 😀
Great use of Amazon boxes.
Absolutely brilliant solution.
Haha Yup!
You can also do it by wearing latez gloves, dropping the truffle in the bowl of melted chocolate and scooping it up with just your middle and index fingers (do not get the thumb involved). Drag the truffle along the side of the bowl before lifting it, to get rid of excess chocolate, and lightly place it on parchment or, even better, on a layer of cocoa powder. Seems convoluted but, with a bit of practice, it comes easy