Ways to use leftover Valentine’s Day chocolate

I cannot imagine this happening to me, but according to Food & Wine it is possible to receive too much chocolate for Valentine’s Day. For those who are fortunate enough to have a windfall of extra truffles or other chocolate goodies, they offer five ideas for using up the leftovers. I suspect you will be able to guess some of them, but there are a couple of ways that might surprise you.

The first way is to chop them up and use them in cookies. There are several types of cookies that call for items like peanut butter cups or chopped candy bars where chopped individually-wrapped chocolates or truffles would be an easy swap. The second is a riff on the first idea: use them in brownies. Any brownie that calls for chopped chocolate or chocolate chips will do. I will admit I did not think of one way that Food & Wine has you use leftover chocolate: as a popcorn topping. They advise you to melt it and drizzle on popcorn, adding nuts if you so desire.

I started thinking of other ways to use leftover chocolates. The most obvious that came to mind was to use dark chocolate truffles as the center of a chocolate lava cake. This would work best if the truffles were cocoa-dusted and not surrounded by a hard shell. Melting high-end chocolates and mixing them with a bit of cream would make for a decadent ice cream topping.

However I might imagine using these items, I know that in my house there will never be such as thing as “leftover” Valentine’s Day chocolates. My husband gets me a large box from my favorite chocolatier every year, and every year I say I won’t eat them all. So far I have not lived up to that pledge.

Photo of Raspberry truffle brownies from indexed blog Two Peas and their Pod