Chocolate as a gift? For Valentine’s Day – a great idea, especially if you make your own chocolates. Interesting, exciting, simple. And both women and men will like such a gift. Among them, sweet teeth are even more common than among the fairer sex.
Homemade chocolate is, of course, much better than store-bought chocolate figures. Yes, everything will be perfectly smooth there, but the product will also contain preservatives and dyes. And in homemade chocolate, you can also add exactly those products and spices you love, and such a gift will be remembered for a long time – so there are pluses all around.
Preparing for the process will not require much effort. You can, of course, go to an eco-shop or find grated cocoa beans and cocoa butter in online stores. In this case, you will get chocolate as close as possible to the store-bought one that we are all used to. But you can do without hard-to-reach ingredients. Then it will turn out almost like a classic tile, but also very tasty.
What you need
The ingredients needed to make chocolate are simple: cocoa powder, butter, milk, and sugar. The only condition is to take all products of very good quality. Butter is not peasant, but traditional, high-fat milk is whole, fresh. And cocoa … A very good powder will do here, of course, without sugar and any additives. It is best to make cocoa from the well-known old Soviet brand.
And you will need molds. It can be just molded for ice, plastic or silicone. You can take molds for sweets or cookies (often curly and interesting). The main thing is that the molds can be put in the freezer. But those that are intended for the oven and tolerate frost well.
What to add to chocolate
To make your chocolates bright and memorable, you can supplement them with different fillings. Just mix chopped nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, walnuts), small raisins and other dried fruits, dried cherries, cranberries, dogwoods, prunes and dried apricots into chocolate, soak and chop (chocolates will benefit if you soak fruits in brandy or rum for a couple of hours), you can add pieces of cookies or crumble waffles – then the chocolates will crunch a little on your teeth.
Orange and lemon zest, a variety of spices, is excellent with chocolate. Here everything is limited only by the manufacturer’s imagination and taste. Cinnamon, vanilla, and nutmeg are considered classics. Ginger and red peppers are great. You can try cardamom, star anise and even cumin-ground, of course. It goes well with cocoa ground coffee. It makes the taste of chocolate more intense and interesting.
You can also make a full-fledged filling, put a nut or prunes in each mold and pour chocolate over it.
How to do
Bitter chocolate
- 4-5 art. l. cocoa powder
- Sugar to taste
- 2 tbsp. ghee (or just butter)
- Step 1. Heat the butter in a water bath and add cocoa. It should be so much that the mixture becomes thicker than sour cream and is difficult to mix.
- Step 2. Put sugar and cook for 5-7 minutes.
- Step 3. Turn off, cool, add fillers (optional) and arrange in molds. Molds can be greased with a drop of melted butter to make the chocolate shine.
- Step 4. Please wait until the chocolate has cooled to room temperature and put it in the freezer for several hours.
Milk chocolate
- 100 g cocoa
- 50 ml milk
- 50 g melted butter
- Sugar
- Vanilla (optional)
- Step 1. Melt the butter in a water bath.
- Step 2. Warm milk and mix with cocoa and sugar.
- Step 3. Then put the mixture into the oil. Mix thoroughly, and add vanilla.
- Step 4. Cook a little and pour into molds.
- Step 5. Please wait until the chocolate has cooled to room temperature and put it in the freezer for several hours.