Whatever Happened to Steve Guttenberg?
Who cares? I had chocolate making class last night! It was held at Truffle Treasures near The Works in Westboro. It started early, so I went there straight from work, and as expected, I was one of the few guys to actually attend the class. In fact, I was the only other guy to attend the class, and to be honest, I didn't care. I was more interested in the chocolate.
The class started off with a wonderful mug of hot chocolate. Since I'd arrived early, I got to order my own and... Wow! I had the dark hot chocolate, which I found out had cloves in it, since I strained one out on my own. No complaints though, as it was free! It was accompanied by a small bag of chocolate covered gummy bears, which cost me two bucks for approximately 12 cents worth of raw materials. I am in the wrong frigging business.
I wandered around the shop, waiting for the class to start... trying not to blow the cash in my wallet. Two dollars a truffle!!! Remember what I just said about being in the wrong business? Yeah.
Class finally began, and was taught by Lara Vaarre, owner and chocolatier. She is also one of Ottawa's Top Forty under Forty for 2006, which is fairly high praise. We started off by making dark chocolate bowls, as you see below. This entailed us inflating a balloon, and dipping it in the chocolate twice (dip, cool, dip, cool, fill). Next came the milk chocolate dipped strawberries, which we decorated with white chocolate.
Through it all, Lara talked about how she got into the chocolate making business. It's a long and interesting road from a former NHL fashion designer to one of Ottawa's Canada's preeminent chocolatiers. Her store was adorned with thanks from a number of Hollywood's A-List (Jim Carrey, Ray Romano) to our Govenor General, Michaëlle Jean.
They offer courses through the summer, and you can be sure, I'll take every one I can, so this won't be the last entry on the subject.
The class started off with a wonderful mug of hot chocolate. Since I'd arrived early, I got to order my own and... Wow! I had the dark hot chocolate, which I found out had cloves in it, since I strained one out on my own. No complaints though, as it was free! It was accompanied by a small bag of chocolate covered gummy bears, which cost me two bucks for approximately 12 cents worth of raw materials. I am in the wrong frigging business.
I wandered around the shop, waiting for the class to start... trying not to blow the cash in my wallet. Two dollars a truffle!!! Remember what I just said about being in the wrong business? Yeah.
Class finally began, and was taught by Lara Vaarre, owner and chocolatier. She is also one of Ottawa's Top Forty under Forty for 2006, which is fairly high praise. We started off by making dark chocolate bowls, as you see below. This entailed us inflating a balloon, and dipping it in the chocolate twice (dip, cool, dip, cool, fill). Next came the milk chocolate dipped strawberries, which we decorated with white chocolate.
Through it all, Lara talked about how she got into the chocolate making business. It's a long and interesting road from a former NHL fashion designer to one of They offer courses through the summer, and you can be sure, I'll take every one I can, so this won't be the last entry on the subject.
posted by Serdic at 23:08
7 Comments:
What a coincidence, I just watched the movie Chocolat tonight and was craving some. Thanks a lot for helping me out there Serdic. :) I might have to make a late night run to the convenience store to pick up something. :)
The funny thing is... Chocolat was playing on the TV. That's definitely a place to go for a nice hangout. =)
Oh my, I am on my way! Yummmmm-o! And I don't even like strawberries. What a fun class, I wonder if they have anything like that around here. But then again, do I *really* need to learn to make anything chocolate!? :)
Cheers,
Kiy
Awesome! Looks good.
It was Chocolate DAY on the Food Network yesterday! Iron Chef America did Battle Chocolate. It was fantastic. Now I want to make something chocolatey.
Did you learn how to temper?
We did cover tempering, where you have to heat the chocolate, cool the chocolate and then heat it again.
This was simply accomplished by adding more calibs (big chocolate chips) to the mix. The addition calibs would bring down the overall temperature of the chocolate. Once they heated up/melted some, you'd have tempered chocolate.
She did mention that the ratio was 2/3 warm chocolate to 1/3 cool chocolate. This would allow it to temper.
No, I'll be honest and say... I still have no idea why you'd do this.
Thanks. =)
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