By Brittany Whitley

Published: March 13, 2008

With a little help from John Hamme, chef at Ariccia Trattoria & Bar in The Hotel at Auburn University and Dixon Conference Center, I made gourmet chocolate truffles — and a mess.

Hamme and Ariccia hosted the “In the Kitchen” event Tuesday.

There were three types of truffles we made in the kitchen at Ariccia — milk chocolate, dark chocolate and white chocolate.

“I chose something you could easily re-create at home,” said Hamme, who has been a chef for about 20 years.

We started the adventure by making the filling for the truffles, which involved warming ingredients over the stove.

For the white chocolate truffles, we simmered cream, vanilla, chai tea and honey.

When it was finished, we poured the mixture over pieces of white chocolate to melt it.

It smelled so good I wanted to eat the soupy mixture with a spoon.

This is not an exaggeration.

The last time I smelled something sweet cooking in my kitchen, my dog had gotten into a bag of Dove Chocolates on the table. That cost about $500 in vet bills.

Plus, I use my oven as storage.

After melting the chocolate, the mixture is spread out onto a plate and left to cool to room temperature.

When the chocolate mixture had cooled, we put it into a pastry bag.

Okay, time to stop. You may know what a pastry bag is, but I did not. So I will explain.

It’s one of those bags you see in movies and TV shows people use to decorate cakes.

It’s shaped like a cone and has a nozzle on the end. You squeeze the bag to dispense the semi-firm contents. In this case, chocolate ganache, which resembles fudge.

When you first squeeze out the mixture, it actually resembles Hershey Kisses.

We then rolled the “kisses” into balls and dipped them in melted chocolate.

They looked good enough to eat before we even dipped them.

When the chef was out of the room, I did eat one.

And it was good.

Finally, we rolled the truffles in different coatings: cocoa powder, confectioner’s sugar, crumbled cookie and coconut.

There was a little boy dipping and coating truffles next to me. He was making less of a mess than I was.

Chef Hamme said cooking takes patience. I told him that was probably my problem.

When I left, I took around 20 truffles with me back to the office.

They were gone in about 20 minutes.

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