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.