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About Chocolate Making Adventures

From cocoa bean to mouth-watering treats...

Make your own chocolate at home.

Most recipes for homemade chocolate involve buying it from the shop then melting it. But what if it’s actual chocolate itself that you want to make?

Thanks to the recent widespread availability of cocoa beans and cocoa butter, chocolate-making has never been easier. You can create it on an ordinary kitchen stove.

Learn to make different kinds of chocolate, then mould it into bars, sweets and even build with chocolate bricks, as you follow Rosen’s quest to become a home chocolatier.

100 pages packed with recipes and tips by chocolate enthusiast Rosen Trevithick and featuring beautiful photographs by Claire Wilson of Live, Life, Explore.


05.12.2015 13:39

How to Create Your Own Chocolate Making Hamper

Would you like to give somebody the gift of making their own chocolate? Or perhaps you'd like to make a really attractive prize for a raffle?

Collecting together all the things you need to make chocolate, and presenting them in a hamper, makes the idea gift for a chocoholic or anybody who loves making their own treats.

Below, I talk you through creating a chocolate making hamper.

An example chocolate making hamper

An example chocolate making hamper

Decide Whether to Focus on a Specific Chocolate

Depending on your budget, you may wish to create a hamper that focusses on specific types of chocolate or you can spend a bit more and open up endless possibilities.

Questions to ask yourself: Does the recipient most enjoy milk, white or plain chocolate? Is the recipient vegan or on any other restrictive diet?

Work Out What Ingredients Are Needed

The drop down at the top of my ingredients page can be used to find out which ingredients are required for each type of chocolate.

Decide Whether to Buy in Bulk

Some chocolate making ingredients, such as cocoa butter, can be very expensive when bought in small packets, but you can't really tuck a 1kg wholesale bag into a presentation hamper. When I created my hamper, I bought enormous bags of ingredients and measured out smaller quantities to go in the hamper. Use this trick if you plan to either make your own chocolate as well, or prepare more than one hamper.

Buy the Ingredients

Many ingredients can be found at your local supermarket; others have to be ordered in or collected from a specialist shop. My hamper ingredients page gives you examples of places to find each ingredient. If you use a supermarket, go for luxury ranges, as they tend to be the best presented.

Present Your Ingredients

Many ingredients, (e.g. honey, date nectar and coconut butter) tend to look great as they are but others may need a bit of sprucing. If you're measuring cocoa butter from a larger bag, you'll need something attractive to present it in. I use cellophane bags intended for packaging cake pops.

Curl ribbon by holding it between the finger and thumb of one hand, and running the blade of sharp scissors along its length.

Label your ingredients. Blank gift tags are ideal for this.

Don't Forget to Buy the Book

Not all the cocoa butter in the world is any use unless you know what to do with it. Complete the hamper with a paperback copy of my chocolate recipe book Chocolate Making Adventures.

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Non-fiction by Rosen Trevithick
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1 comment

05/12/2015 15:40
Ian Mackintosh says...

Thank you a really informative piece on make your own hamper. Fortunately, once I win the raffle I won't need to make one!! ;)


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