Hedgehog Truffles

I had leftover ganache from the donut cake, so I put it in a silicone ice cube mold and stuck it in the freezer, with hopes of popping out some adorable hedgehog truffles. Success!

I bought the silicone mold I used at Michaels a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be for sale anymore, although Michaels does have a good selection of other silicone molds (affiliate link here and below). 

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Hedgehog Truffles

Materials:

• ganache
• silicone mold
• parchment paper
• milk chocolate hot cocoa mix
• Wilton black sprinkles mix pack 

Steps:

Prepare the ganache, then put it into your silicone mold. I did one sample bunny to see if it would come out without breaking (no). Avoid shapes that have very small areas barely connected to the main portion - it's pretty much a guarantee that the bunny ears (and possibly the tail) are going to break off, as will the squirrel ears, hands, and tail. 

Put the mold into the freezer until the ganache is completely solid. 

Open a packet of hot cocoa mix and spread it onto a sheet of parchment. Unmold the truffles directly onto the cocoa, then turn the truffles until they are coated on all sides. 

Arrange the truffles on a plate, then give them black sugar pearl eyeballs and use quins (round flat sprinkles) for noses. 

Rich and chocolately, these hedgehog truffles are as tasty as they are adorable!

Raspberry Hot Cocoa

I used to be a hot cocoa purist - the darker and more chocolatey, the better. But I was playing around with my LorAnn oils and discovered how AMAZING raspberry hot cocoa is. These little candy hearts are tasty on their own and make the perfect delivery system for just the right amount of raspberry in a mug of hot cocoa. Mmmmm!! Affiliate links below. 

Raspberry Hot Cocoa

Materials:

• heart candy mold
• red Wilton Candy Melts
• LorAnn raspberry flavor
• Guittard hot chocolate

Steps:

Prepare 3 oz. of Candy Melts following the instructions on the package. Add three drops of Raspberry flavor. The candy will thicken slightly, but this is fine as long as you get it in the molds relatively quickly. Only fill the molds about halfway, as thinner hearts will melt more effectively in your hot cocoa. 

After the candy has set (approximately 10 minutes), pop the hearts out of the mold. Serve 4 hearts with each 8 oz. mug of piping hot cocoa. 

A New Batch of Roundups

When I'm not working on My Creative Life, I'm busy running Fun Family Crafts. Here are the latest batch of kids' craft roundups, starting with Hot Cocoa Crafts and Recipes. I had a lot of fun putting this one together. One of my projects is in the graphic below. Can you spot it? 

We have over 100 Santa crafts at Fun Family Crafts. A few of those are mine, but only one is in the roundup. Do you see it? 

I love this adorable collection of colorful, googly-eyed turkey crafts. 

I didn't think of clocks as being seasonal until I started working at Fun Family Crafts. Clock crafts tend to get a lot of traffic this time of year because of their connection with New Year's Eve.  

Finally, cow crafts. I only used six projects in the graphic, despite the fact that we have way more than that on the site. A lot of the cow crafts on Fun Family Crafts are photographed as part of a group with other farm animals and couldn't easily be cropped to show just the cow. I think the 6-project graphic is still effective. 

As always, I made all the graphics using PicMonkey.