Sunday, February 06, 2011

What is brown and tastes like chocolate?


Answer, chocolate!
For my anniversary Amber brought me a chocolate making experience which found us in London last Sunday. I booked it for the morning so we went up on the train early Sunday morning. The location was a less populated area of London which was quite odd as it was almost completely deserted. As the wind was literally whistling through the tube station that we were walking out of and I made some comment to Amber about how we had entered the Victoria tube station and come out in an alternative universe as I have never seen any part of London empty before.

We found the correct address and entered a rather large building and found our way to the basement through a long series of corridors. I whispered to Amber that we were about to bopped on the head and they would never find our bodies. By this stage there was a group of us so I figured that we were either quite safe or had just entered part of a massive crime operation that was so sophisticated that we were completely doomed and there was nothing we could do!

We entered into a room and were introduced to our host and then we learned some history about chocolate. For example America was the country that ruined it. It was Hershey's that removed the cocoa fat and added oil and sugar to make the product have a higher melting temperature so it would be suitable to send it to troupes on the front line during the war. after that we got to the chocolate making which was very messy and lots of fun. The first thing we made was a gigantic chocolate button (like the size of a dinner plate) and then decorated it. There are no photos as they did not survive the trip home due to breakage. Then we moved on to the truffles. The recipe we used was very simple and we can make more at home now we know how. Once we had the soft truffle centre part we then dipped them in more chocolate and decorated them up. by this stage we had already eaten quite a bit of chocolate so it was pretty easy not to eat them as we were making them but at very end our host told us that none of the supplies could be reused so we should just eat any leftovers. Amber and I didn't need to be told twice so we did. Funnily enough we had fruit and salad sandwiches for lunch.




The finished result.



And then they were all gone :(

So that was our chocolate making adventure. Next up, Prague!

This is me harassing Dini!

Mean but oh so cute :)