Back to the market! Location, location, location!

We had a great vacation in Argentina. My sister-in-law got married and I had my first experience in celebrating weddings, Argentinean-style. The wedding started at 9 pm, the party ended at 8 am. There were so many people, so much food, and a lot of dancing! For a moment, I wasn't thinking about chocolate. For a moment.
But during a visit to the city, we visited a bookstore and I saw all these wonderful books about chocolate. The recipes were none that I have seen in Canada, and so I was inspired by the fact that I could explore chocolate further. Now, the book I bought is not available in English, so I figured, what better way to learn my Spanish than to read a book about chocolate?

So, during our visit, the market owner emailed me and asked if I would be interested in moving my booth to a better location. He would move the stuff for me and give me a rent-free week. That was promising. It was a lot of work. My husband went to the market on the Friday and worked the booth to make it appealing. But in the end I started from scratch, having sold all my chocolate from Valentine's Day. My new display case was empty for two hours as I laboured away at making chocolates. But in the end, I made new customers and it begins again. I didn't see my regular clients and I hope they don't think I closed. I'll have to find them again.


I am continuing also on my chocolate course and one of my assignments is to create some signature chocolates. I think that creating something that is your own from scratch is a challenge.
What you think might be unique has already been done. Most likely it has been done because there are hundreds of chocolate shops all over the world. Instead, I decided to work on flavours that will be memorable.





A friend of mine visited me last week and she gave me a box of 70% mint chocolates. She thought that perhaps I needed a break from all the chocolatle making and that I would enjoy just have a box from somewhere else. I have my own version of mint chocolates called Milky Mint. I used milk chocolate because it is creamy and I thought would off-set the sometimes strong mint.






So.... yes, after we tried it, we realized that, yes, chocolate makers have recipes just like any baker could make a cake with the same ingredients and they would all taste the same. (I guess you can say we preferred mine better or are we just biased?)






I practiced making recipes beyond chocolate since I realized that part of the chocolate are the flavours. So I made candied grapefruit, fondant, and fudge for the first time. The candied grapefruit was a multiple-step process. I had to peel, take out the pith, boil and blanched the peels twice, and then simmer them in a sugar syrup for three hours. With the fondant, I had a sugar recipe, which I had to whip over and over again until the clear liquid became an opaque white, thick mass. The chocolate fudge was a mix of a caramel, chocolate, and lots of sugar. I had to wait until the very hot liquid cooled to 43C (which took three hours) and then I whipped it. All the results were amazing but it took me a whole day for three recipes.





Along with the new flavours, I introduce to you lime-coconut rum truffle (see above). Mmm. I used the zest of a lime and Malibu coconut rum. The initial taste of the lime followed by the sweet rum reminds me of tropical heat. And just returning from the 40C Argentinean heat, that is a close reminder.





I mixed toasted pecans into the chocolate fudge and enrobed it in dark chocolate to off-set the sweetness. However, I didn't want to used 70% chocolate because fudge lovers are sweet tooths. I needed to use chocolate as part of my assignment but I think fudge was so fun to make and great to sell for the summer, that I might venture into fudge by itself but using different flavour combinations. I also used cocoa butter transfer sheets for the first time and I love the use of the colour on top of the otherwise brown chocolate. It's exciting to see that and it definitely made the customers look at the fudge.