After decorating cookies to our hearts content, we jumped into the wonderful world of chocolate!
Pastry Chef Lia took her place in the kitchen and began to teach us all about her specialty: chocolate.
She first started by walking us through a little candy making education.
(I loved her immediately because she's a 'hand talker'!)
She demonstrated mad skills making a butter toffee.
And all the while she's doing this, she's explaining to us different things about chocolate. Namely, the importance and method to temper it. (Basically, when you heat chocolate up, the fat will separate out of it, so you'll need to emulsify it as it cools to keep it all together. This lets it dry nice and hard at room temperature. Which explains SO much as to what was going wrong in my kitchen!)
Ready to flip over:
And get more chocolate and more (in this case) peppermint pieces.
And chopped nuts:
(She also made one with sea salt, which I think was hands-down the crowd favorite!)
Ree wrote a great post called Lia's Butter Toffee with step by step instructions, so you too can make this!
THEN, we moved on to the art of making truffles! And Ree just posted step by step instructions on how to make the ganache and chocolate coating, if you'd like to check it out. It's complete with amazing photos of the truffle making process!
Chef Lia taught us this great technique for getting your truffles coated: slapping on a pair of gloves and getting your hands dirty - literally!
Then we all got our hands dirty!
Here are a few of the ones we got to roll:
Yummy!
Some of these babies made it into these cute little bags. I brought one home for Matt. It's kind of a miracle it made it home at all!
She also taught us how to do fun things with chocolate, like write words and make decorations.
When she was demonstrating, she asked for the closest upcoming birthday, and Baby Samantha beat out everyone else!
I almost hate to show you our attempt at writing with chocolate, but here it is:
Chef Lia has a favorite technique for dressing up a dessert. She calls it 'bat wings', and when wet, it looks like this:
And it doesn't take it long to dry at all before you can peel it right off the wax paper and stick it in something yummy to make a big impression!
As a finale of sorts, she showed us how to construct a 3D creation. Like chocolate magic.
Christy took this amazing shot of everyone's favorite truffle butterfly!
I wonder if Chef Lia is available for hire? Everything she made was AMAZING!
Pastry Chef Lia took her place in the kitchen and began to teach us all about her specialty: chocolate.
She first started by walking us through a little candy making education.
(I loved her immediately because she's a 'hand talker'!)
She demonstrated mad skills making a butter toffee.
And all the while she's doing this, she's explaining to us different things about chocolate. Namely, the importance and method to temper it. (Basically, when you heat chocolate up, the fat will separate out of it, so you'll need to emulsify it as it cools to keep it all together. This lets it dry nice and hard at room temperature. Which explains SO much as to what was going wrong in my kitchen!)
Ready to flip over:
And get more chocolate and more (in this case) peppermint pieces.
And chopped nuts:
(She also made one with sea salt, which I think was hands-down the crowd favorite!)
Ree wrote a great post called Lia's Butter Toffee with step by step instructions, so you too can make this!
THEN, we moved on to the art of making truffles! And Ree just posted step by step instructions on how to make the ganache and chocolate coating, if you'd like to check it out. It's complete with amazing photos of the truffle making process!
Chef Lia taught us this great technique for getting your truffles coated: slapping on a pair of gloves and getting your hands dirty - literally!
Then we all got our hands dirty!
Here are a few of the ones we got to roll:
Yummy!
Some of these babies made it into these cute little bags. I brought one home for Matt. It's kind of a miracle it made it home at all!
She also taught us how to do fun things with chocolate, like write words and make decorations.
When she was demonstrating, she asked for the closest upcoming birthday, and Baby Samantha beat out everyone else!
I almost hate to show you our attempt at writing with chocolate, but here it is:
Chef Lia has a favorite technique for dressing up a dessert. She calls it 'bat wings', and when wet, it looks like this:
And it doesn't take it long to dry at all before you can peel it right off the wax paper and stick it in something yummy to make a big impression!
As a finale of sorts, she showed us how to construct a 3D creation. Like chocolate magic.
Christy took this amazing shot of everyone's favorite truffle butterfly!
I wonder if Chef Lia is available for hire? Everything she made was AMAZING!
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