Chocolat!

This morning, at 9 a.m. sharp, a friend and I reported for chocolate making class.  We went to a class at Cacao, in Brentwood, MD.  Interestingly, the chocolatier, Jacques Poulain, just opened up his second shop right down the street from my house in Cleveland Park.  Mr. Poulain has an impressive resume, including having been the head pastry chef at the Ritz-Carlton, Kapalua Maui.  

When you go to a chocolate making class at 9 a.m., it means... chocolate for breakfast!  We were sampling different varieties of chocolate within minutes of walking through the door (once we had our hair nets on, that is).  Mr. Poulain was very entertaining - he demonstrated how to make a dark chocolate ganache and a caramel mango passionfruit ganache, both of which were delicious!  I learned lots of interesting facts about chocolate, including the fact that removing air bubbles from chocolate extends the shelf life by 3-4 weeks (from 1 week).  Pretty amazing.  He also demonstrated how they "paint" chocolates, which really has nothing to do with painting.  They screen print the images and transfer them to the chocolates.  Who knew?

The best part of the class came when we were set loose to make our very own dark chocolate flowers and white chocolate caramel mango passionfruit truffles (whew!).  My favorite was the flower. To make the chocolate flowers, we used spatulas to hand form the differently sized petals on strips of parchment paper.  The trick is to move quickly enough that you can put your strips of petals into a mold to curve them before they harden.  But the petals also need to be the right thickness, width, etc.  Oh, and you can't pretty down too hard with the spatula.  Got all that??

The center of the flower is a dark chocolate circle with a white chocolate truffle in the middle.  Once our petals had hardened sufficiently, we used warm (tempered) chocolate to assemble our flowers.  It was so much fun!!