So, yesterday I attended my first ever bloggers event and to make it even more exciting it revolved around chocolate!
As soon as I received the email invite to the #mychocbloggers event back in March I knew it was right up my street and HAD to go! Plus the event was being held in London and I love any excuse to be a tourist!
The chocolate workshop event was arranged by the lovely Lauren from the @LDNmeetup Twitter group and hosted by the My Chocolate Company - it's safe to say it exceeded my high expectations!
The day started early getting the train into London at 8:30 (this is early for me at least!) with my new found blogger pals Charlotte and Hannah, to arrive at the event venue in Islington for 10:30. While we planning the journey before hand this seemed like an easy task and we had even made time for a tea stop but we couldn't have been more wrong! We arrived in Islington at 9:30 thinking we had plenty of time to make the short walk to the venue only to end up lost for an hour! After scaling the canal for a good half hour, realising we were on the wrong side and having to find a way to cross that didn't involve swimming we finally reached our destination - a beautiful all glass building facing out onto the canal. Luckily we weren't the only lost ones...
The venue was set out with wooden tables covered in different chocolate samples, marshmallows, a tray full of yummy toppings and utensils. Once we were all seated and had donned our aprons we got an introduction from the owner of My Chocolate explaining how a small idea had grown into such a magical company and was introduced to our instructor Davis.
First he gave us an insight into telling the difference between high and low quality chocolate by having us taste two different chocolate buttons (that's what they looked like anyway!) one of which was high quality Belgian chocolate and the other was a low quality chocolate. He taught us how determine between to the two and what ingredients were used making a chocolate either high or low quality. Davis then got us to try the two different shards of chocolate we had each been given on the table ..one was white covered in seeds and the other was a dark chocolate. We each tried the two shards and tried to guess what flavours had been used. The white shard was a sweet mix of lemon and poppy seed which was lovely! The dark shard was a mix of ginger, cardamon and cinnamon ..honestly I hate any thing that even tastes of cinnamon so this piece wasn't for me! Chocolate opinions aside was a great little test to see what flavours everyone was picking up. Us bloggers may not be chocolate connoisseurs yet but we do know a thing or two about good chocolate now!
Next Davis showed us how to make chocolate Ganache in order to make little chocolate truffles. He made it look super easy mixing the cream and melted chocolate together and piping the mixture into little drops but it wasn't as easy as we had hoped! After making a bit of a mess we were shown how to roll the drops into truffles and how to dip and decorate them - this was the fun part! Within minutes there were giant bowls of milk and dark melted chocolate on every table and chocolate, toppings and marshmallows flying everywhere! By the end of the 20 minutes we were given we were all covered in chocolate and coco powder but it was so worth it!
Finally we got to package everything we had made into little gold boxes and cellophane bags tied with colourful ribbons to take home in cute little paper bags!
At the end of the workshop we got to have a chat with the owner of My Chocolate who told us about the new workshop kits they now sell online as a branch company called the Chocolate Hedgehog. The kits are for 4 people or the larger kit is for 8-12 and contains everything needed to hold your own little chocolate workshop at home! Safe to say I will be buying one of these for my next night in with the girls!
The workshop event was a fab experience getting to know bloggers from around the country and making dreamy chocolate treats to take home with us.
For anyone interested in the My Chocolate company I've added the link to their website ..it even includes delicious recipes and tips in the blog section! - http://www.mychocolate.co.uk
Lauren is one of my best blogging friends and I'm so gutted I couldn't make the event :( it looked like so much fun, I saw loads of pictures!
ReplyDeletex x | daisydaisyxxo over twitter!
Such a shame you couldn't make it, it was a fab day! Would have been lovely to meet you xx
DeleteIt was such a fun day wasn't it! Shame I didn't get to meet you, hopefully see you at another event soon :) x
ReplyDeletewww.ellebloggs.com