This post is a tad late. I know Easter was about a month ago and by now you’re well and truly had your fill of chocolate eggs…or maybe you haven’t like me.
Recently, I’ve been doing lots of cookery courses with my cousin such as the Paul A Young Brownie Master Class but also having afternoon teas like the Matilda theme one, which has been fantastic. I work a lot with savoury food products and even though I love my job, sometimes it’s nice to go sweet baking. In the last couple of months, we’ve done three different courses together and hopefully, another baking course planned for summer in Bristol. One of the courses we did, was at the beautiful Rococo Chocolates, Belgravia in London. And we brought our mum’s along too, who I think is the main reason both my cousin and I love anything chocolate.
We booked on to the Easter egg decorating course, the weekend before Easter (yes I am that late writing this up!), and hurried through the drizzle to the oasis of chocolate. Met by Julia, who was going to be our chocolate guide for a couple of hours, complete with cups of dark rich hot chocolate and raspberry marshmallows whilst taking us through the production process of how to get the sexy chocolate from the beans.
There was just the four of us on the course, which was fantastic and made it more a special cousins and aunties/mums event. We were led downstairs to the chocolate kitchen. We had 4 halves of lovely chocolate to decorate with crispy wafer pieces, freeze-dried yoghurt nuggets, chopped nuts and iridescent crispy pearls and of course, more dark chocolate. Below you can see our efforts, some worked better than others but what was important was that we had a great time!! We may have gotten slightly messy piping and sprinkling, which was hell trying not to lick your fingers!!
While we waited for our beautiful decorations to set, we were led back upstairs to taste some of the chocolates on offer. First off was a spiced pecan pie style ganache, which was probably my favourite. Rich, buttery, with a gentle spice to the nuts, delicious! Next was a wonderful tropical number, a soft, light coconut creamy layer top of a rich chocolate ganache, Bounty bars will never be the same! Then came cardamom, coffee and marzipan chocolate, this was very tasty chocolate, but I found it had maybe too many strong flavours competing, still very good, though. Next was a very pretty raspberry ganache, bursting with the fruity notes from the berries and also the tartness to cut through the richness of the base.
Lastly and by no means least, a Kalamansi Lime Caramel which recently won gold at The Academy of Chocolate Awards for best-filled caramel. A filled dark chocolate shell shaped like a cocoa pod, filled with the most amazing tasting caramel, like the sexiest tart a citron (but with lime) you’ve ever had. A deserving winner.
After devouring those treats, we went back to our eggs to fill them with Rococo’s Sea Salt Carmel Sea Gull Eggs. Which definitely look like seagull egg but in no way taste like them. A rich sea salt caramel (not heavy-handed with the salt at all) covered in milk chocolate. I think my cousin would have been very happy about taking the whole bag! They were great! We wrapped our eggs up in cellophane and a Rococo ribbon. They looked brilliant, almost professional…. but didn’t last too long.
After all the chocolate you would think we want a savoury hit, well we kind of did. We headed to Fortnum and Mason for afternoon tea. Keep your eyes peeled as the next post will show you the lavish lunch we had.
Part of one of my designs in a shard
Address Book
Rococo Chocolates
5 Motcomb St, Belgravia, London SW1X 8JU
Tel: 020 7245 0993
Website: http://www.rococochocolates.com/
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