Candy Making 2014

Clean kitchen, before the hordes arrived

I had a full house for candy making.  There were nine of us cooking up Easter chocolates.  I hadn't even started my toffee when the first person arrived!  It's a good thing the new place has a big kitchen.  We were all in there mixing and chopping, dipping and decorating.

In addition to organizing the group in a new kitchen, I tinkered with the chocolate tempering.  Some of the changes were based on last year's results and some from the chocolate workshop I attended in February.  We had mixed results.  The white chocolate didn't behave well with the Oreo truffles.  We had some ugly (but delicious) truffles.  We'll have to work on that some more next year.

Messy dipping

The milk and dark chocolate behaved better.  We kept the tempered chocolate warm with heating pads, and set two people for dipping - one person to dip and another to keep scraping down the bowl.  This was a success, overall.  It was messy, but we had far more of the chocolate remain melted longer than when we didn't scrape the bowl.

My photographer wasn't around when we finished all of the chocolates, so no sexy shots of chocolate.  You'll just have to trust me that they all looked delicious, and the designs on them were as beautiful as usual. (We had some new nifty artwork this year.)

In for the kill

Once they were all done and the group photo was taken, the packing frenzy began.  It's like sharks circling their kill as everyone filled containers with the goodies we worked on all afternoon.  In just a few minutes, I was left with my share of chocolates, scattered across the table on several trays and plates.

I even got to keep a few low-sugar peanut butter eggs my sister made.  They contained natural salted peanut butter (no added sugar), almond meal and dipped in dark chocolate.  Salty, not sweet.  It was an interesting combination of flavor and texture compared to the other candies we made.  We may have to make a bigger batch of that next year.

Thank you all, for your help and enthusiasm (and your patience with me).  Another successful year!  I hope you're all enjoying your hard work.

The Candy Cooks!