Chocolate Truffle Class

Oh those online deals are so addictive!  Me and my friend Liz went to Dawn's Candy and Cake to take a chocolate truffle making class

We filled chocolate shells with chocolate ganache that we flavored with essential oils, fruit purees, nut butters, and liqure. The combinations I picked where

• Hasetlenut and Chilli
• Lemon and cheesecake
• tequila and lime
• brandy
• passionfruit

 We were hoping to learn to roll out our own balls, but with the time constraint this was much easier.

Here we're melting chocolate for the coating. 

They taught us about tempering chocolate and how we could skip a lot of the hard work by using an existing piece of tempered chocolate as a starter.

~Stir stir stir~

We had to seal off our chocolate shells with a harden coating of chocolate so our ganache doesn't spill out.  ~dabbing with melted chocolate~ which sets really quickly.

We were taught to THROW our chocolate balls  into the melted chocolates, making a "plooop" sound as we did it.

Fishing them out with a special fork so it can slide off without any finger prints created.

The melted chocolate sets in about a minute so while it's still liquidy we put on little decorations like sprinkles or crushed nutz.  Great tip they taught us is to use a decoration pattern to determine which chocolate you are eating.

Yay, here are my chocolates

Seattle Chocolate Salon

The Seattle Chocolate Salon is basically a small sampling festival of fine chocolates.  Although it's small, there is still too much chocolate for one person to consume.  There were many artisan chocolates, chocolate wine stall, and some random Yelp and Olive Oil & Balsamic vinegar, and tea stand (with no chocolate).  I was a little disappointed that there weren't any coffee or savory dishes presented.  Oh well, on to some pretty pictures 

 Karen here makes these beautifle Chocolate Tulips, great gift that I bought for my boyfriend for only $2.  Unfortunatly they were pretty fragile. 

Vibrant Chocolate was very pretty and really tasty as well.  They tempered their chocolate to give it that shine.

Taza Chocolate wasn't about looks, but about tradition and texture.  Their Mexcian chocolate is processed using stone mills so it's still gritty.  Suprisingly people really enjoyed it because of its rustic nature.

Chocolate-Dipped Cookies

We have so many relatives that we see over the holidays it is just not reasonable to buy gifts for everyone! But it isn't too hard to mass-produce yummy treats! You could just buy some and wrap them in cute bags, but when you make them yourself and wrap them yourself it is a nicer touch that anyone will appreciate.

Every Christmas my mom makes chocolate-covered pretzels as gifts, so I made chocolate-dipped Oreos and graham crackers! And then added sprinkles.



Some turned out kind of ugly, but they were still TASTY!

If I did it again, I would just stick with Oreos; perhaps an assortment of Vanilla and Mint.



I found cute reindeer bags and added a tag, jinglebell and ribbon. To make the tags I just cut out the shapes from cardstock paper, punched a hole in the end for the ribbon, stuck a Christmas sticker on one side and addressed the other.

Fudgey Dark Chocolate Cupcakes

Cupcakes are way more fun to make than big cakes. Plus, they are totally cute!

I made this batch of cupcakes for a baby shower. I made the cake and the icing from scratch. I found the recipes online.

The icing ended up being very thick and hard. I used a chocolate topping recipe but messed up on the ingredients and ended up mixing in a ton of extra dark chocolate chunks. As a result I ended up with dark chocolate fudge on top of cake. No complaints here!

I found the gold foil cups at a craft store as well as the light blue sprinkle balls. For winter I think I will make some white-frosted cupcakes and use the blue sprinkles for a festive snowy look.