was about to mention that my wife is also a chocolatier – but I won’t now

Too late.

My wife is also a chocolatier. She adores working with it but like you somafunk isn’t all that partial to eating it herself. She is angered however by my love of peanut M&M’s.

Christ. Is everyone a fudging chocolatier?

I thought Somafunk was the only one.

It’s a bit like an AA meet. First you have to admit you are a chocolatier before you can do something about it.

Its all about who you know Jamie 🙂

Whilst it might seem ideal, as Somafunk says now is a very busy time and my wife is stressed to the eyeballs getting all the orders ready for christmas – one large G&T will be ready once they’re all delivered.

Drooling all over the keyboard now.

“Click , is it safe to come out yet?…..it’s getting a bit crowded in here as it seems another 4 chocolatiers have taken refuge in my panic room” – we’ve started to argue about the merits of hand tempering on marble vs machine tempering and chocolate is about to slung at each other.

teacake : , yeah, i have made some rather unusual combinations – one of my favs is marbled dark chocolate and stewed beetroot fresh cream ganache truffles, rolled in very fine crumbled goats cheese – they sound odd but believe me they taste absofeckinlutely amazing, they have that sort of taste that makes you jump up and down in your seat with surprise whilst pulling a “Mmmmmmmmmmore please” face, fresh cream truffles have to be eaten within hours of making them though so i only make them for special occasions, One of my fav quick n’ easy recipes to make at home is oven baked whole almonds, rolled in semi-melted high quality caramel when still fairy hot, cooled enough to stay in a workable shape and sprinkled in maldon sea salt when almost set and encased in either milk or dark chocolate or drizzle the melted chocolate over them on a tray. It’s quite easy to eat rather a lot of these.

Where do you produce?, who for? – we do all the major retailers and the girls have just finished a run of 40,000 chocolate moulded snowmen for boots, see my post back on page 1 wi the martini glass in it? – the snowmen are at the bottom – it took the 4 girls weeks to make them as the moulds only held 4 snowmen at a time (50 moulds/200 snowmen a run) and you hand to hand/finger paint the snowmans white bits on first then fill wi chocolate and turn ‘n tumble on the spinny/windmill machine for ages.

whatnobeer : Where did you stay? Gatehouse?. Yeah claire has done really well, i started wi her 6/7 years ago just planning to help her out out for a few weeks as i wasn’t working at the time nor looking for a job either, it was just claire, myself and one other girl with two packers, her first big xmas order came in when she was up in her old house and working out of the semi converted garage/workshop, she got an order in from John Lewis for large chocolate decorated stars and it was quite a shock….”they want how many?….by when?”, needless to say we got them done with very long 12hr days/7days a week and i remember melting the chocolate in the aga in the house and counting the minutes/seconds down as one minute to much and the chocolate would be knackered and useless, then running across to the workshop wi a bain-marie of chocolate and filling the tiny tempering machines we had back then, back across to the aga wi more solid chocolate to melt seems strange that was only a few years ago but the business has just grown and grown silly amounts since then, our new factory is only 2 years old but we need more space already, and the kids workshops and car park is packed out at all holiday times – i guess chocolate is recession proof as everyone considers it a justifiable treat.

So c’mon all you chocolatiers?, show us your fav filled chocolates or recipes, i’m sure the stw’ers would just love to be taunted some more 😀

have taken refuge in my panic room

Panic room, eh?

*gets the big drill*

Here’s my favourite of what my wife produces, nothing like as fancy and technically adept as the work that somafunk does. A plain chocolate bar with whole roasted cashews, crystalised ginger and dried cranberries.

I call it WYSIWYG chocolate, all flavours are there for you to see before you bite into it, no mystery about what the filling will be and whether you will like it.

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mangoridebike – basically like a big mondian. Nice

atlaz – yep, she does wee ones too, but I’m a fan of the larger ones, for obvious reasons 🙂

buzz-lightyear – Member

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