Homemade Chocolates

Happy Chinese New Eve. It’s tradition to have your big meal on the eve so that you can have leftovers on the actual New Years day which is tomorrow so that you don’t have to cook and just be lazy. There is so much going on. There is Chinese New Year, Valentine’s Day, and Family Day. I couldn’t figure out which to blog about. I was inspired by last week’s revelation that Valentine’s Day was coming up but then there are these other things that we have blogged about in the past as well. Maybe I’ll do posts all month about them even though the holidays have passed.

Let’s do a Valentine’s post. I have recently taken up chocolate making in isolation, haha. Chocolates are always a tasty Valentine’s Day treat. I remembered as a kid I had made chocolate covered cherries so I decided to try it out. I bought a couple of molds on Amazon and then I went for it.

                                                         

I melted some semi-sweet chocolate then I used a food safe brush which I also bought on Amazon and I painted the outside layer of the molds. Then I placed the mold in the fridge for about 10-15 minutes until they were all hardened.

Next I placed a maraschino cherry into each of the molds and spooned a little bit of the cherry juice on top.

Lastly I cover each of the chocolate with more of the melted semi-sweet chocolate and then leveled them all off. Put them back into the fridge for at least 15 minutes. Try and keep them in there for a longer amount of time. An hour or so would be great.

Once they have been hardened in the fridge, then knock them out of the molds and place on a place and enjoy. If you have more than one mold then do a few at a time but if not, then repeat the process as many times as you want after you knock the first batch of cherries out.

Next I tried this but with cream fillings. I remember when I was little I had some yummy cream filled chocolates that my Aunt would bring from the States. They were so yummy so I am going to try these out.

You can use the same molds. Now for these, you can do semi-sweet or milk chocolate or even white chocolate. Your choice.

I found a base cream recipe. It’s basically a vanilla cream and then you can add flavourings. Some yummy flavours would be lemon, mocha, white chocolate, cherry, strawberry, orange, caramel (you can even melt caramels and just pour some in like a Rolo), coffee, vanilla, and mint. Those are just a few. I’m sure I could think up more. So many options but which one to start with. Maybe a Rolo type caramel one and two crowd pleasers like orange and mocha?

Cream Filling Recipe:

½ cup of butter

4 oz. of cream cheese

4 ½ cups of icing sugar

1 tsp. of cornstarch

Cream the butter and the cream cheese.

Slowly add the icing sugar and beat until fluffy.

Separate into a couple bowls and experiment with flavours.

I put about 3 tsp. of orange extract in one along with the zest from 1 orange and mixed that all up for an orange filling.

 

I also made a chocolate cream. I added about ¼ cup of cocoa and 2 tbsp. of melted semi-sweet chocolate to the base and then added in 2 tsp. of vanilla as well.

Then place them into your prepared chocolate molds and cover and harden.

Now taste test. Divine! These were gone pretty fast.

                                                              

Penguin Heart Card

Welcome to February. I can’t believe we are here already.

Today we are going to take a look at a card that I recently made and go through the steps so that you can make it as well.

I have a special someone who loves penguins just as much as I do so for their birthday a little while ago, I made a super penguin card. Here’s how to make one (go ahead and make it with whatever creatures that you love most).

I bought a Winter penguin stamping pack on boxing day one year. It was on sale at the craft store and I thought for sure I could use them at some point.

When picking out a card backing I went with a nice Wintery blueish grey. I just folded the paper in half as I wanted a bigger card because I was working with quite a few stamps.

Then I cut a white layer that was just slightly smaller than the card front. It had to be big enough so that I could lay out five penguins in a row.

Next I took all of my penguin stamps and I laid them out on the from of the card all in a row. I tried to position them to make them all first perfectly but I also wanted them to “blend” nicely and look all well matched on the front of the card.

Now comes the more tedious step…you have to stamp each penguin onto the front of the card making sure each one is perfect otherwise you’ll have to start all over again. Make sure you have enough ink on the stamp so that everything stamps clearly. I started with the two end penguins, then did the middle, and then finally did the two on either sides of the middle penguin. I was able to stamp two penguins at a time and then embossed them. The ink didn’t dry that fast.

Colouring is the next part. I decided to stamp and emboss a few of each penguin and tried out some different colour combos on them. Then I went for it on the card.

After that, I stamped the words. I wanted to keep it simple so I found a “HAPPPY” stamp, very plain, and stamped it on a grey 3 ½ inch x 1 ½ inch layer. Then I added … and wrote the rest on the inside. I glued this layer on roughly the center of the white layer.

Then I added hearts. I love penguins and hearts and they must be included together on a card. I went with your typical red hearts and then also added some blue to compliment the blue card. I scattered them around the white space on the main layer.

Lastly I glued the white layer onto the front of the card and then I was done!

Now you have a cute penguin heart card that I just realized that you can use as a cute Valentine’s card as well which is only a few days away.