Luxury Chocolate Workshop at MyChocolate With Red Letter Days

Chocolate is most definitely in my list of favourite c-things (alongside Canada, cheese and Christmas). Whether a solid bar to nibble on, a spread to upgrade my sandwiches with or a rich liquid to cosy up with on a rainy autumn day; I love my chocolate in all shapes and sizes. However, I don't often stand still by the process that makes all the chocolate I devour so scrumptious. Until I was given the opportunity to attend an actual chocolate making workshop courtesy of Red Letter Days and MyChocolate, where not only we got to make our own truffles, giant chocolate button and cocktail but we learned some nifty facts along the way too. 

I love food and workshops, but besides a macaron making masterclass a few years ago I've never actually combined the two until experiencing the Luxury Chocolate Workshop from MyChocolate – and now I want to plan ALL of the foodie masterclasses, because this was such fun!



The class was held in the spacious MyChocolate location near-ish Highbury and Islington and straight off the bat we started by making a chocolate cocktail, yum. That is how I want to spend every night after a long and stressful day at work now. First we decorated the inside of our glasses with pretty chocolate swirls by flicking liquid chocolate around, before creating a magic concoction of liquor and chocolate into the ultimate chocolate martini. It had more than a touch of chocolate Baileys to it, which is one of my favs so needless to say the evening was off to a good start for me.




While enjoying our cocktails, chocolatier Melissa showed us the art of creating a giant chocolate button (or beautiful heart-shape in her case). She spread two spoonfuls of malleable chocolate on baking paper and then decorated it with chocolate of a different colour. It looked so simple when she did it that all ambitious I decided to make a flower and I ended with uh... a kind of cloud? Haha. To be honest though, I had mixed in a few drops of orange essence with my chocolate and it was so delicious that the shape it came in didn't matter at all.



Next up, we mixed chocolate with cream to create a rich and gooey ganache that was delicious, but hardened very quickly, so rather than creating elegant truffle-shaped chocolates ours looks slightly indecent. Thankfully once they had hardened even further we had the opportunity to roll them in chocolate powder and shape them into more delicate designs, before decorating them to our heart's content (first dipping them in chocolate and then covering them in all of the toppings) so they ended up looking beautiful anyway. You can cover up a lot with beautiful pink chocolate curls and little bits of honeycomb!



We also had some marshmallows and a gorgeous piece of chocolate fudge to decorate. We were supposed to use little cookie cutters to cut cute shapes from the fudge but it was quite hard and I was impatient, so I ended up dunking the whole piece in the chocolate and decorating it all at once. For this I used some awesome transfer paper that once the chocolate had hardened peeled off to leave a beautiful pattern in the chocolate, so very cool.



In between making the ganache and decorating the truffles we also had some lovely Prosecco and did some chocolate tasting, which was super interesting. I'm one of those people who usually eats half a bar in one go and so actually standing still by the different flavour notes of the various kind of chocolate for once was a really cool way to appreciate this delicious food even more. I can't promise I won't gobble down a big piece of chocolate in one go again in the future, but my knowledge has definitely been enriched for future pub quiz use. 😏

Last but certainly not least, we got to pack up all our goodies to take home and while I can't say that the giant chocolate button survived the night (I *had* to devour it as soon as I got home), I managed to savour the truffles and have only had a few of them so far so the chocolate workshop enjoyment is lasting a little while longer still.



Many thanks to the lovely team at Red Letter Days for inviting me to be one of their #RLDTasters and to MyChocolate for creating such a fun workshop! I had an absolute blast and I am now most definitely planning some more foodie masterclasses to enjoy in the future.

🎵 Listening to: My Chemical Romance – Famous Last Words
🔹 Mood: Tired...
(I've been feeling nostalgic for the song and mood options Livejournal conveniently allowed adding to each blog post, should I bring it back?)