chocolat take deux

Another Groupon.  Another chocolate making class.  This time it was flavored truffles - way easier than the last class, but just as much fun!  No fancy machines or molds required!!  

Barbara, Jackie and I stumbled across the street from the office (literally) to Now We're Cookin' for champagne and chocolate making fun tonight after work.  They had five different samples of the flavored truffles we were going to make and encouraged us to try each one so that we could choose the flavor we wanted to make.  Shocker - I chose grey sea salt!  Barbara chose orange and Jackie vanilla.  

We mixed the ganache and got a little instruction on techniques for making truffles while it was chilling.  Most of our class chose to pipe the ganache out of a pastry bag rather than scooping or rolling.  I knew right away the piping would work for me and zoomed right through.  Barbara and Jackie had a little bit of a harder time with the piping, but in the end they all looked exactly the same!  And tasted good too!!  We coated the truffles in cocoa powder and powdered sugar, packed them in our little containers and were happily on our way.  Loads of fun for a Tuesday night!

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sunday chocolate

 

Could you think of a better way to spend a Sunday night than learning how to make chocolate?  Um... not me!  I used my second Groupon at Canady Le Chocolatier for "The Divine Art of Chocolate Making!"  It was a three hour class where we learned about the different types of chocolate, how it's harvested and most importantly, how to make beautiful chocolates!  

We had a class of six and stayed paired up on each task.  First up were the fillings - we made dark chocolate ganache, mint white chocolate ganache, chocolate caramel, apricot mango and chocolate ganache infused with red pepper.  Kendra and I had the task of making the caramel - it was the slowest process E V E R, adding teeny tiny bits of sugar, watching it melt and swirling it around the pan for what seemed like forever.  I will say that it was worth the wait.  It has the deepest smoky flavor and stayed perfectly smooth - never hardened or glopped together like most caramel.  Oh and we added a touch of whisky that actually took a bit of the edge off of the caramel.  

After all of the fillings were made - and sampled - we moved to filling the molds.  We were taught how to temper chocolate (we used only the best, Valrhona)  by hand and then off to filling our molds.  While they set, we sipped champagne and learned a bit about the owner of Canady Le Chocolatier and where he studied the art of chocolate making (oh and he make true Italian gelato too) and what it's like to be in the chocolate business.  

We each came away with a box of 12 custom made chocolates that were amazing!  We, of course, had to sample some while packing our boxes and OMG were they fabulous!