Pumpkin Truffle Eyeballs

This wasn’t in my original line up of recipes, but I figured I better share it before Halloween! Does your neighborhood get “boo’ed?” Ya know, where they door bell ditch a treat on your doorstep and leave a cutesy little poem about Halloween and how you’ve been boo’ed? And then you have to “boo” two more people and hang a ghost on your door so everyone knows you’ve already been boo’ed? Okay, well, I’m living in a place now that is known for this kind of 1950s family friendly fun and I love it. If you want to get in on the booing action then you should check out THIS blog where she gives 16 different version of it. Obviously you know where I’m going with this because we got “boo’ed” and I decided I needed to make something very Halloween-esque to pass it on. Usually I focus just on taste and don’t do a lot of cutesy stuff, but at least my regular readers know that even though this one is cutesy, it tastes pretty dang good too. These eyeballs are just the right amount of grotesque, and they are filled with pumpkin goodness. Sure, you could do it with an oreo truffle, cookie dough truffle, or gingersnap truffle, but for Halloween you can’t go wrong with pumpkin. 

Hands On Time: 30 to 45 minutes 

Ready In: 3 hours

Yield: About 2 to 3 dozen truffles

Ingredients

8 whole graham crackers

1 cup pumpkin puree

2 TB brown sugar

6 oz. cream cheese

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

1/8 tsp ground cloves

2 cups white chocolate chips

24 blue, green, and brown M&M candies

1 tube red writing icing

Instructions

1. Place graham crackers in a food processor and process until completely crushed. Add in pumpkin puree, brown sugar, cream cheese, vanilla, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves. Process until smooth. Refrigerate 2 hours until truffle dough is thick and easy to shape into balls.

2. Shape the dough into round balls, around 2 to 3 dozen. Put on a wax-paper lined tray in the freezer until ready to coat with chocolate.

3. Melt chocolate chips in a microwave safe bowl (see cooking lesson below).

4. Dip the pumpkin truffles into the melted white chocolate to coat. Put an M&M on top of each truffle while still wet. Set on a wax paper lined baking sheet to harden. 

5. Use the red writing icing to draw veins on the eyeballs, about 5 vein lines per truffle. 

Melting chocolate is super easy, yet it can end quite poorly if done wrong. Burnt chocolate just isn’t good. When melting chocolate in a microwave you should only microwave for 10 to 15 seconds at a time. Use a rubber scraper to scrape the bowl, and then repeat until the chocolate is mostly melted. When there are only a couple of bumps left, just keep stirring until the chocolate is smooth as the heat of the rest of the melted chocolate should be enough to melt it completely. 

If your chocolate begins to harden at all as you dip, simply pop it back in the microwave for 10 seconds, and stir. 

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