Easter chocolates

greenbee

I'm making chocolates for easter... I've got my couverture in white, milk & dark, dug out my chocolate moulds (fantastic new polycarbonate ones I was given for my birthday, so no more struggling with silicone!) and made up batches of ganache in all three colours.

However, I'm struggling for inspiration on the flavours... I need to work out things that work with ganache, because I don't want to be working with sugar syrups and neat alcohol, although I did wonder about fondant fillings...

I also need to remember that I have to be able to identify the chocolates - so I have three different moulds, and three colours, which gives me 9 options, and I can also use gold dust, glitter, dried fruit and nuts inside the mould before the chocolate goes in to help identify them.

In the past I have used:

orange - cointreau and orange zest
apricot - dried apricots & apricot brandy
almond - amaretto & ground almonds
coffee - coffee liqueur & instant coffee granules
rasberry - raspberry liqueur
ginger - stem ginger
chestnut - creme de marrons

I have found some rosewater (bbe 2004, but still smells of roses) and a selection of alcohols, plus lots of dried fruits and nuts.

I'd like to reflect the current sunny weather and try to come up with some spring-like flavours.

Any and all suggestions gratefully received!

MrsChaos

Rosewater sounds good, but I'm not sure what would go well with it.

I saw elderflower and vanilla used together to flavour panna cotta in the river cottage programme yesterday, but it's probably too ealy in the year for elder.

You could have a look at some websites for inspiration (thornton's , house of chocolate etc).

Not sure that's been very helpful at all.

caitybabes

Hello I did this for family and friends two Easters ago. I did 10 discs of chocolate for each person so I had a flavour which I mixed with the chocolate and a topping to identify them. Here were my flavours:

• White chocolate and cinnamon (mixed and topped with cinnamon powder)
• Milk chocolate and mint (mixed with peppermint essence, topped with minty sugar which was demerera mixed with peppermint essence for crunchy mint topping)
• Dark chocolate with coffee (mixed with coffee powder and topped with crushed coffee beans)
• Milk chocolate orange (mixed with cointreau, topped with orange zest)
• Swirled (marbled white choc into milk choc discs, topped with chocolate sprinkles)
• 'Jazzies' (milk or dark choc, topped with hundreds and thousands)
• White choc with ginger (mixed with ginger powder, topped with chopped crystallised ginger)
• White chocolate topped with chopped, dried cranberries.
• Milk chocolate topped with chopped nuts

I reckon baileys would be a yummy flavouring.

Hope you have fun with it

Cait x

greenbee

Thanks for the ideas guys... so far I've made three sets of dark chocolate shells, and filled one batch with dark choc, orange zest and orange curacao; one with white choc and framboise (and a little pink colouring paste); and one with dark choc and chopped cherries. I've added quite a bit of liquid to the ganache in each case as it had set quite hard and I want the centres to be softer (easier to pipe too!) for the spring. So lots of clearing up to do, and hopefully this batch will come out OK tonight, and I can make milk chocolate shells for tomorrow and another 3 lots of flavoured ganache. I'll keep going over the next few days until I'm bored!

All the ganache is made with boiled cream, so these will last for months if necessary... I see a lot of present problems being resolved if I avoid eating them myself!

hex2

I find Hotel Chocolat very inspiring.


A couple of suggestions adapted from the Greweling book:
Ameretti with pine nuts to decorate
lavender dried flowers in the dark ganache, and then a few as a garnish
dulce de leche type stuff in the centre, then wrapped in coffee ganache *dribbles*

I also like coarse grinding vanilla sugar in the food processor and rolling truffles in it
and using a few granules of the big cane sugars to put some crunch on top of otherwise standard ones
and florentine squares on top of normal truffles remain my all time favourite HC ones. Must be replicateable?

oh, and white chocolate and pistachio or macadamias. Yum.