Choctastic

Friends are great pretty much all the time. But sometimes they out-do themselves. Like when they give you a chocolate-making workshop for your Birthday - whoo!!

Yes, a week or so ago it was finally time to head down to MyChocolate (weirdly located in the same building as the silver jewellery workshop) and begin our instruction.

We began by sampling some chocolate pieces of varying sugar and cocoa-solid content while our instructor extolled the benefits of raw chocolate and encouraged us to experiment with adding it to various savoury dishes. Chocolate and fish? Apparently divine..

Do note how *clean* everything looks here. Yes, that might change.

Having had some large metal bowls full of melted chocolate plonked in front of us, we were told that our first job was to 'temper' it. Basically we had to bring it down to the right temperature but stirring and adding extra chunks of chocolate. Fair enough.

A bit of elbow grease later and we were ready for the next stage: making a giant chocolate button. Although of course when the teacher announced that there would be a prize for the most creative 'button', all convention went out the window and everyone began work on their masterpieces:

Next up was ganache, and this is when things started to get *really* messy.. Two parts melted chocolate to one part cream, and some piping later, it was time to dip and decorate our truffles:

Utter chocolate-coated carnage, but miraculously they turned out alright in the end. I think the little cellophane bags helped a lot.

And my heart-shaped chocolate button turned out ok too, even though it didn't win the 'most creative' award. That was nabbed by the cat-head shaped one. Well, there's no accounting for taste ;)

Still, it made the perfect Father's Day present!

Thanks to the fabulous C&M and T&C for our sumptuous outing. In fact, any chance you might want to come around and sample some of the produce? I don't think we'll be stuffing ourselves with chocolate again for a little while..