Rich Chocolate Ganache Recipe

Chocolate ganache is one of the more versatile items that we can use when we are either decorating, topping, or just dunking cookies, cakes, doughnuts, anything you can possibly imagine. I'm Rachel Tupel, and in this lesson I want to share with you a really simple chocolate ganache recipe that you can use to adorn any of your favorite treats. So to get started, let's talk a little bit about chocolate. Uh, chocolate is one of those things that comes in many forms, and it typically varies both in sugar content as well as cream content. So you might have a milk chocolate that is very sweet and has a lot of milk fat in it versus something like a bittersweet chocolate, which is almost pure chocolate with just a little.

Bit of additional items like sugars and milk fats. So you can choose a variety of chocolates to be able to use with your ganache. Uh, one of the main things to keep in mind is that your ratio in a ganache from cream to chocolate will change depending upon the type of chocolate you use. In this lesson, I'm using a 60% bittersweet chocolate. And that means it doesn't have a whole lot of sweetness and it also doesn't have a whole lot of milk in it.

So it's a very rich, deep, dark chocolate. With that, it will make a great topping for things like a clare's or doughnuts, or maybe even a drizzle around the top edge of a cake. There's lots of different uses for this type of ganache. Your ratio for a dark chocolate like this is gonna be 1 to 1. So that means for 1 cup of heavy cream to 1 cup or 8 ounces of chocolate is your ratio.

And the way that we're going to do this today is actually in the microwave. Now, traditionally, you would make a ganache by either warming up your milk over a pot and getting it to a point where it's just steaming, not quite, uh, boiling. Um, but just starting to steam and pour it over your chocolate. But this is even easier, we're just gonna microwave it for about 1 minute and a half. So I'm gonna let the cream start heating and while I'm doing that, I'm gonna go ahead and cut up my chocolate.

Now there's a lot of different ways in which chocolate comes. It comes in different forms. So it could come in a bar or chips or little disks. There's blocks of chocolate, so there's lots of options out there. I'm actually using a baker's bar, and that's readily available at your grocery stores, and it definitely is a very rich chocolate.

So you want to use this as more of a topping rather than just a pure ganache icing, for instance. Um, if you're going to ice a cake with ganache, you'll probably want to use something more like a semi-sweet chocolate, or even a milk chocolate or a white chocolate, um, would be lovely as well. If you choose to use chips, just know that sometimes you have to adjust the ratio a little bit because it is a little bit harder uh to judge. How much of a stabilization agent they've used in the chips, you know, chips are made to hold their shape where uh bars and other discs and things are made to be melted. So just keep that in mind when you're choosing your chocolate.

You can also mix your chocolates a little bit too and just know that you have to adjust your ratio of heavy cream to chocolate. So for instance, You could use this rich dark chocolate and melt it in with some milk milk chocolate, and that's gonna actually give you uh a bunch sweeter, softer chocolate flavor rather than such a deep dark flavor. So you can definitely play with the type of chocolate that you're using. Just to adjust your flavor profile as well. Now, what I'm looking for in my cream is a little bit of steam.

We don't want this to be above 180, so I am just gonna watch and see um how hot this cream actually is. We definitely want our cream to be at least 120 degrees or so, and that's gonna give us a nice warm um cream that's gonna help melt this chocolate a little faster. So I started with about 1 minute and a half. This is cold cream out of the refrigerator, so it might take a little bit longer, um, but I'm gonna do it in 32nd increments now. Because we don't want our milk to actually burn, uh, we just want it to come to a higher temperature than our chocolate.

Uh, it allows that chocolate just to melt really nicely. So while that is going, the reason I chop my chocolate is because the smaller pieces are actually going to melt much faster. And when we're working with uh a hot cream and a chocolate, the key is to make sure that everything melts really nicely and uniformly. You don't want to have big chunks of chocolate left over when you're stirring in the warm cream. All right.

So just make sure you don't have any huge chunks in there. All right. There's a few bubbles starting to form, so I know that we're really close. Let's see where we are. All right, so I know that we're going past 120 and we're nowhere near going all the way up to 180, which is perfect.

So what I'm gonna do is transfer my chocolate into a bowl. Now you could use a glass bowl, you could use a mixing bowl, uh, whatever works best for you. I'm using glass so you can kind of see what happens here. And I'm also just gonna measure my Chocolate. If you have just chocolate chips, for instance, you want to make sure that you're getting the right amount in your bowls.

Again, the ratio of chocolate to cream is really important for making sure you get the right consistency of ganache. Alright, so we have 8 ounces of chocolate, and we have 8 ounces of cream. I'm gonna pour that hot cream right over top. And then I'm just gonna give it a little jiggle. That's just to get the cream and the chocolate combined a little bit, so that there isn't just a big chunk of chocolate sitting in the middle.

You could also stir this if you'd like. And then I'm gonna place a piece of plastic wrap over top just to lock in some of that heat. What we're trying to do here is get the chocolate to melt at a slow rate with our warm cream. So it just needs a few minutes to kind of get through some of those bigger pieces of chocolate that we have. So let it just hang out for a few minutes, and let's chat about some other ways that we can utilize our ganache.

So you can use this style of ganache. Um, it's not gonna actually firm up to the point that it's rock hard again. It's gonna stay soft. It's great for uh dipping fruit in. Um, it will firm up eventually, so you might need to keep it over something warm, like a little heater.

Um, the other thing that this is great for is drizzle and drip. So whether you're drizzling on the edge of a cake for one of our beautiful cake drips, um, or if you are dunking your, uh, doughnuts in. Or maybe a black and white cookie. Um, these are perfect because while you'll have a firm set in the end, it's not rock hard, it stays soft. So it's got a really nice bite to it and it's got a beautiful sheen to it as well.

In addition to cookies and other confections, um, you can use this, uh, in the next step, which would be to actually whip it, and you can use it as a butter cream or something to ice your cake in. And in this case again it's going to stay a nice soft consistency um but still firm up enough to be stable and you could decorate over top of it or put fondant over it, whatever you'd like to do. So there's multiple uses for this style of ganache. Uh, one of the last, uh, details to ganache is whether or not to use butter inside of your ganache. And, um, it really is, uh, a bit of a choice.

I prefer to use just a little bit of butter for a richness that, um, it brings almost like a little bit of a creaminess that melts in your mouth kind of texture. Uh, so utilizing a little bit of butter in your recipe is an option. Uh, for a size, uh, bowl like this with a cup of, um, cream and a cup of chocolate, so 8 ounces of each. Uh, I would say about 1/5 of a tablespoon is gonna be ideal. And what that does is it just enhances that richness, that gloss, just a little bit of extra flavor more than anything.

So what I'm doing at this point is incorporating the cream and the chocolate together, and what you want to try to do is avoid really vigorously mixing this. And that's because we don't want to incorporate any type of air into the ganache. We want it to be um just nice and smooth and creamy. As this continues to melt, the shine starts to change as well, that deep, dark color will start to come through. And you would get just this beautiful chocolate ganache.

Now, if for any reason your cream wasn't hot enough, um, or your chocolate was too big, you didn't dice it uh and quite as fine as it probably needed to be. You can't always put this back in the microwave. I do recommend just 15 to 20 seconds at a time to make sure that everything is incorporated and melted nicely, but you don't want to burn this. So burnt chocolate tastes very, very bitter and it just is not a good flavor whatsoever. So the one thing that you want to make sure you don't do with ganache is overheat the chocolate.

Now you can see at this point, it's very liquidy, but I do have some bigger chunks of chocolate that are left in here. So I'm just gonna try to break them up a little bit. They're definitely softening, but they're not quite soft enough yet. All right, so let me put this back in the microwave for just a few seconds. Alright, so after 15 seconds of warming that, our chocolate should start to completely melt into our cream.

One of the things that you can do is just leave it sitting for about 5 minutes with your full uh plastic wrap sealed. You can also throw a towel over it to keep it a little bit warmer. But the microwave is your friend when it comes to making sure that all of that chocolate is melted. So what you're gonna see once this chocolate is fully melted is just this beautiful drip of chocolate. And this is where the uh riches comes from when you look at delicious desserts like a Claire's that have chocolate glaze on top or doughnuts.

It's such a tasty and beautiful accompaniment. When you have gorgeous desserts as well. All right, so this is what we're looking for nice smooth consistency. We want it just to literally drip right off of our spatula. This is the perfect dipping ganache out there, 1 to 1 ratio.

If you'd like, you can add that little hint of butter, and it just makes everything a little bit sweeter. So I hope that you'll give this chocolate ganache recipe a try. It's a 1 to 1 ratio, it's super easy, really quick, and it's a delicious treat.