I was recently invited to Let’s Make Chocolate Christmas (this may not have been its real name!) by Vanessa Kimbell. The amazingly talented (and very lovely) Chantal Coady let us loose in her Rococo chocolate factory. We started the afternoon with hot chocolate, her master chocolatier Barry then demonstrated how to make goats cheese ganache, how to temper chocolate and gave us all lots of tips and advice.
Barry gave us all of the tools for us to temper chocolate with – a marble table, plastic bowls, a ‘bent’ palette knife, rubber spatulas and essentially a wallpaper scraper and wall skimmer! I have some of these objects, but clearly a trip to my local DIY shop is in order!
The beautiful (and delicious!) chocolates from Chantal’s goats cheese ganache recipe:
Once a few of us had had a go at dipping chocolates (and we’d all tried the ganache and chocolates on offer), it was time to swap our gifts (and find out who had won the prizes for the best chocolates on show!)
Shamefully, I didn’t pay close enough attention as to who won what (my friend had arrived with her baby and I was cooing!), but congratulations to all those who had won. The standard looked very high and everyone had made a tremendous effort.
I made sea salt chocolate madeleines from Chantal’s stunning new book and a black forest roulade/log.
I left with some truffles, an amazing goody bag from Chantal and her fabulous book, which I can’t recommend highly enough. I can’t wait to play with chocolate and made more goodies from it!
claireshandmadecakes 