Serious Chocolate Class #4 - Chocolate & Caramel Creations

This week, we learned how to work with caramel to make a variety of chocolate confections. Making caramel is luckily something I'm very familiar with so at least I wasn't totally out of my element with that!

These are Strawberry Anise Caramel-Filled Chocolates. The foil cups were interesting to work with. You had to coat each cup with chocolate individually and they were quite time consuming. The combination of strawberry and star anise is an interesting one too! There is a whole hazelnut at the bottom of each cup to give some crunch and the strawberry anise filling surrounds it. Each chocolate is capped off with chocolate, drizzled with a pink white chocolate and topped with a pistachio piece.

These are Caramel Balsamic Truffles. Hmmm, I've never been much for balsamic vinegar... so one might imagine how enthusiastic my reaction was to find out we were going to put it in a caramel... It is actually quite good though, although left to my own taste preferences I probably wouldn't add the vinegar if I made them again. The balsamic caramel was piped into truffle shells and coated with chocolate, icing sugar and cocoa powder.

These are Quince and Caramel Ganache Chocolates. I had never tasted quince before - it has a very strong aroma and a distinctive taste, and honestly one that I'm not sure that I like... That being said, I love the mold we used for these chocolates and the addition of the bronze lustre to them was fantastic!

These are Chocolate-Covered Praline Blatten Krokade... sounds ridiculous when I say it, but believe me, if a German pastry chef tells you what they are, it sounds fantastic! Essentially the inside of these chocolates is a caramel that you work like a dough with praline paste to incorporate many layers of each. It's rather like a puff pastry when you bite into it but with praline and caramel. They don't look that impressive... but are likely the most delicious tasting one we made this week!

We also made a Caramel Nut Chocolate with walnuts but it hadn't set by the end of class because it was hot outside so hopefully we'll get to try that one next time! It looked like it would be really yummy!

The next class is sadly the last one but it should be fun - chocolate showpieces! Oh and we are going to make one or two types of marzipan pralines because we haven't done any of those yet! Should be good :)