Chocolate making just for me!

One of my lovely birthday gifts was a chocolate making workshop.... To do at home! This was perfect for me as I am quite antisocial at times! I took the kit away with me to Kent where we were staying for another birthday adventure and happily spent a good couple of hours on Saturday afternoon creating chocolatey goodness!

The kit itself is beautifully presented and jam packed with everything you'll need for the experience: from the chocolate and decorations to the cookie cutters and baking paper.  There's also a massive instruction sheet which you can hang up in the kitchen to help you along the way. 

First of all, you have to melt all the chocolate: there's dark and milk...and plenty of it!  Once it's melted you start on your first creation: chocolate truffles! You make the ganache by stirring double cream into some of your melted chocolate, it's incredibly decadent and took all my self restraint not to eat it there and then. After that, it's time to practise your piping skills and pop the ganache into the fridge until later, when they're ready to be dipped and decorated. 

One of my favourite parts of the experience was making the tempered chocolate. It involved putting chocolate on your top lip to check the temperature - the chocolate moustache caused a lot of amusement and giggles!

Once your chocolate is the perfect temperature to give it a lovely, shiny finish, you can start coating fudge with chocolate and using edible transfers to decorate. The best bit is, your instructions tell you to eat the leftovers and it was delicious!

You also get to flavour your chocolate and in the kit there are rose and lemongrass waters. I love rose flavouring and have used it in cooking before but I have never thought to use lemongrass with chocolate. It's so fragrant and citrusy! After flavouring your chocolate, it's time to get creative and decorate! You can choose from white chocolate shavings, caramelised hazelnuts and strawberry chocolate curls, which all look beautiful on the chocolates.

We had so much chocolate left over (must have been very restrained and not eaten much chocolate throughout the making process!) so we made extra giant chocolate buttons, chocolate covered strawberries and blueberries and a massive slab of chocolate too! 

The whole experience was so much fun and it was great to be able to do it at home and in my own time. The kit gave you enough guidance to feel confident enough to do it alone but was not super rigid - you could be a bit creative! You make around forty chocolates which you can then package in little cellophane bags and they look so appetising.  I was so impressed with the quality of the kit and the ingredients - it all felt (and tasted) luxuriously delicious.   I would definitely recommend this experience to chocolate lovers for any occasion; you can get the kit from The Chocolate Hedgehog.