YES! I don’t just eat food, I make it as well!

I spent this afternoon learning how to produce chocolate ganache (truffles) - how to prepare the chocolate, add different flavours, make them look attractive and then top them off with white chocolate decoration. Let’s have a look…

Ugh - if you think this photograph is bad, it looks WAY worse in person. Chcoclate and cream are melted together and then piped out of a large hole onto greaseproof paper. The result looks almost uncannily like…well, you can tell. It’s amusingly horrendous.

Thankfully, after they’ve been cut up into bits and rolled into shapes, they look a lot better. The process is very messy and makes you look like you’ve been pond-dipping with your bare hands, but smells a lot better. I couldn’t take photographs whilst doing it due to the likelihood of camera-wreckage, but this picture is after the bits have been rolled in dessicated coconut, flaked chocolate, or drinking chocolate. (The flaked chocolate was also hand-made: more on this later.)

At this point the basic class ended, but I paid for the second class in which we learned how to ‘temper’ chocolate to produce the shiny effect you get on commerically-produced chocolate bars. The ganache was hand-covered in tempered chocolate through another very messy process, making the sort of chocolates you’d see in ‘real’ chocolate shops. We then decorated them with melted and tempered white chocolate put through an icing bag. This was the result:

(Mine had to sit in a cold window as the white chocolate was thick and wouldn’t set properly.)

I learnt lots about the chocolate-making process and I’ll be writing more about that in a further post. For now I need to stop thinking about chocolate for a while or I won’t sleep…