Introduction to Chocolate (Part I)

After the Art of Cakes – Classic to Modern, I told myself, “I need a break! No more baking class in the next 6 months!" Then Cherry asked me if I wanted to take Introduction to Chocolate with her. Do I really like chocolate? I’m not a chocolate fan, but I do want to use chocolate to decorate my cakes sometimes. I struggled a little bit before asking Ho for his “blessing”. After a series of “please, please, please…”, he asked, “Are you really going to take a break after this class?” I said, “… maybe I can take Cake Decorating next year.” Heehee… we’ll see about that.

So, here I am, taking a professional course at Geroge Brown – Introduction to Chocolate. When I read the syllabus, it gave me a nice surprise. Not only do they temper chocolate to make decorations, they utilize the method to make all sorts of cakes and desserts. I love this course! There are a lot of first timers at GB in this course, Cherry and I, being in the 4th course, should be more experienced comparatively… but no, we failed in the first 2 weeks! Luckily this course is not graded. The chocolate ganache cake and cranberry almond bark were all a mess! The cake fell apart, the bark became a bulk of chocolate and we had to cut them in cubes! Luckily our confidence came back when we did the chocolate dipped biscotti and strawberries, the truffles were successful too, whew! The course is really hard!