Chocolates, 2009
As many of you know, every fall/winter season I focus my culinary creativity and get to work making candy! I love to share what I make, but many of my friends live far away, so I also give you a chance to "win" a sampler box. I'll get to the "rules" in a moment; first, take a look at what I've made.
Toucans w/ passion fruit ganache:
Inside:
Triple Layered Gianduja:
"Sleeping Beauties"
Grand Marnier Cordials:
The Toucans are white chocolate, painted with orange cocoa butter. Inside is a passion fruit ganache, which gives them a tart contrast to the sweet white chocolate.
Gianduja is chocolate blended with nuts--the nuts are toasted and then ground to release their oils before blending. This confection has a layer of white chocolate w/almonds, milk chocolate w/almonds, and dark chocolate w/hazelnuts.
The "Sleeping Beauties" have a layer of buttered, chewy caramel, a layer of chocolate nougat, and are dipped in dark chocolate. Similar to a Milky Way bar, but I think my are superior. :-)
Finally, the Grand Marnier Cordials were my attempt to learn to make liquor filled chocolates. The technique involves making an impression in a bed of dried starch and filling it with the sugar-liquor syrup. The syrup forms a shell with a liquid center, allowing them to be dipped. This was pretty tricky--the first attempt involved bottle shaped molds which were too small. They broke easily and didn't have much liquid inside. The rest of the syrup was used in free form designs made with a knife handle (big thanks to Destra for that) which worked much better. Still, I have fewer than 30 as a result.
The Lottery!As I mentioned, I give away sample boxes every year. Entry into "the lottery" is free. My condition is that I have to know who you are, either in person or online. I'm really just disqualifying strangers who find my post, bots, etc. Also, you need to be in the U.S. or Canada--it's too expensive for me to ship overseas.
I'll take the list of everyone who enters, remove those folks who are getting boxes from me anyway (I make these as a small-something to give to family and local friends) and use a random number generator to pick the winners. If you've won before, you can enter again this year.
To enter, comment on this post, or send me a DM or @reply on Twitter (@Avatrix) saying so. If you win, you will have to send me your mailing address so that I can send you the chocolates. As much as I'd love to give away dozens of boxes, I'm limited by the cost of shipping each one, the cost of ingredients, and an actual limited number of candies. Destra is still hunting for a job, so it limits our finances. (Every year, several people offer to pay for the shipping. I'm still unsure what to do with that, as once someone pays anything for my work, I feel a higher level of obligation on what I deliver. I'll consider it, but haven't made a decision yet).
What you can win is a box sampler of four candies. Normally it's one of each, but this year I'll be giving out two of the gianduja pieces, as there aren't enough of the liquor cordials. If you win, I'm interested in hearing how the arrive when I ship them. I've tried different boxes and packaging every year to protect the candies, but it's never quite right--so feedback on that is the most useful to me.
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