Pumpkin Truffles

Right around October 1st, my friends start asking me about my Pumpkin Truffles. I first made these about 4 years ago for another friend's HUGE Halloween party. That year I made about 100 of these little morsels of goodness with varying coatings on the outside. Every year since I've some variation of these lovelies.

This year we hosted our own Halloween party for about 50 people and I decided that the truffles would be appropriate once again. This year's batch yielded about 75 truffles.

They're not that hard to make and if you're a true chocolatier, you'll likely be devastated by the list of ingredients.

I used the Wilton's Orange Candy Melts, but you can user white chocolate and color it with some glycerin based coloring. That's what I did for the green stems.

Here are the ingredients:

• 1 cup toasted slivered almonds
• 2/3 of a box of regular graham crackers
• 2 teaspoons of cinnamon or pumpkin pie spice blend
• 1/2 cup of powdered sugar
• 1/2 cup of canned pumpkin
• 8 ounces of melted semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 1/3 ot 1/2 cup of Starbucks Coffee Liquor

After you toast the almonds, grind them up in your food processor until they're fine, but not butter. Do the same with the graham crackers. Mix the ground up nuts, ground graham crackers, spices, and powdered sugar together in a bowl. Add in the pumpkin, melted chocolate and coffee liquor. Stir until well blended.

The mixture should be pretty thick; not too runny and not too stiff.

Next I lined a small cookie sheet with waxed paper and used a small cookie scoop or melon baller to scoop out the filling. At this point the shape doesn't need to be perfect, you're just getting them divided up so they'll cool a little faster than being in one great big bowl.

When you've scooped out all the filling, place the truffles in the fridge until cool - about an hour.

When the truffles are cool, take them out and roll in your hands until they are more rounded. Then you can dip them in just about anything from powdered sugar to sprinkles. I used the orange coating and a little bit of green on top to make them look like pumpkins. A bit of cocoa powder would be nice as well.

If you're interested, this is the spread from the Halloween party, before the drunks started throwing food everywhere. This is actually only half of the food we had, but it's still an impressive table.