Wednesday 29 June 2016

Lindt Chocolate course

Continuing on from my Birthday of Note, I redeemed a voucher Pam gave me for my birthday - The Lindt Chocolate course.





And now for a bit of a conundrum  so let me reverse here a tad, I am not a cook and am not really interested in doing actual cooking, but I am a Master-chef fanatic and in my head I can nap and drizzle and jus, roux, add height and quenelle along with the best and discourse quite eloquently on the subject


But making cheese and now chocolate really grab my attention, so Pam gave me a voucher for us to attend the chocolate course at the Johannesburg Lindt chocolate studio.

The reason the gift was for me but for both of us, is I want experiences as gifts, and the experience must if possible be for us to do together.

So on a Saturday morning we arrived at the studio for a 4 hour class in Chocolate Tempering, Decor & Molding.


We were duly taken through the a talk on chocolate, the coco bean, type of chocolate percentages and much more.

Then we were explained the technique of tempering - here I must say I would have liked to do some actual tempering, but time somewhat precluded it.

So it was right on into the thick of things with moldings and ganache fillings



Pam filling her mould to start the process






Piping the ganache filling into the chocolate mould


All filled and ready to have the back of the chocolate poured on






Pour on the back






........And then scrape


All done, not to leave to cool and set hard


Chocolate envelope with transfer, would make for an excellent pudding with berries and custard inside

For cake or dessert type garnishing - sprinkle vegetable fat powder onto the acetate sheet on the slab, then smear chocolate (colour of choice) over the powder.

Then you can take a toothpick and doodle some squiggles into the first layer of chocolate (I did on mine, Pam opted not to) then smear the opposite colour of chocolate to the one used across it, and then leave to set.
Once set you can cut it up or snap into shards to suit your requirement










Then it was on to making chocolate cigars, basically you smear chocolate onto the slab, let it cool a bit and scrape up with a palette knife to form them



Chocolate cigars


A sample of our production to be savored at our leisure