Chocolate Making experience by My Chocolate

I was very lucky to be given the luxury present of a chocolate making and cocktail experience when I left my previous workplace. I was so excited!!! 🙂 what a great present and defiantly my favourite from what I was given.

I didn’t know what to expect but the experience started at 7.30pm and was going to be 3hrs long. I didn’t want there to be too much waffling going on, 3hrs! Can you imagine?! I went with my mum as I think it’s hard to know which friend to take.

We all started with a glass of prosecco went in the workshop which was in a large room where there was 12 people to each table and we found a seat wherever we wanted. The table was laid out with parchment paper a spoon and what I though looked like prong fork and a various number of chocolate pieces.

The guy who was taking over the class was funny and made you feel welcome. One of our first experiment was giving us experience of the difference between what’s is good quality chocolate and what is bad quality chocolate. We tried it and independently said which one we felt was the worse quality chocolate. He talked about the history of chocolate and what you can make and use it for. We also tried the other pieces of chocolate some which were flavoured and we had to say what we thought was in them.

We also got to make cocktails in groups which was really funny and made us interact with the group a lot more. It was fun trying to make the swirl to decorate our cocktail glass. Mine shocking didn’t turn out that bad, however my mums looked like a car crash loll. I also had my first experience of trying cocoa nibs which were quite an unusual taste not to everyones liking but I was surprised at their benefits.

We got to make our own thin square of flavoured chocolate (that’s where the spoon came in) we mixed the oil that we choose I went for ginger and orange and my mum went for strawberry. We then placed them on a piece of parchment paper spread them to form a square shape and left them to the side to dry. I liked being able to make my own flavoured chocolate.

Then the even more fun part came towards the end of the session where we got the make the truffles. We had to work in a group to partly make the gananche ourself and there was a competition to see who could make the mixture the fastest wining the chance of getting some more chocolate for our table, unfortunately our team didn’t win 🙁 but he did still give us some chocolate. We had to to make 6 truffles with the mixture and were were also given some chocolate fudge and a slab of this Italian chocolate that had hazelnuts in, I have totally forgotten the name. It was absolutely yummy I actually didn’t use these for my truffles as I thought it was a waste and I just ate it as it was. (I would love to get to buy this again) For the truffles we could use either dark or milk chocolate to dip our truffles in and that’s where the fork thing came in, we placed this truffle on there and used them to take them out, there is a technical name for this but yes I forgot! oops. We then cover them with the 8 toppings they provided, rose petals, crushed dried raspberry, white chocolate curls, a decorative transfer, desiccated coconut, cocoa powder and a crunchy honey comb topping. This was really enjoyable, therapeutic and slightly messy!

It was nearing the time for the session to end and the tutor also wanted us to see how chocolate and port and sweet wine tasted. At this point I was feeling slightly sick from the chocolates but I tried the port and the truffle and I do think it went well. I heard the sweet wine was horrible and didn’t taste nice so I didn’t bother with that.

We were given a lovely gold box to put our chocolate in and a spare cellophane little box for any extra. My parchment paper that my truffles where laid on looked a complete mess. Once they were peeled away and put in the box they looked a lot better lol. I took these photos the quickly with my phone the next day at home.