Christmas Chocolates

This is one that I completely forgot to take photos of while making it... and almost forgot to take photos after making it as well... It was only a week or two after christmas that I remembered I had these stashed in the cupboard (the rejects from the batch!) and was able to get a photo of them... You'll also spot some yellow chocolate stars with the other Christmas 2013 desserts that I'll post about (e.g. Gingerbread boxes).

Anyway I wanted to try making some themed chocolates, so I bought some chocolate moulds on eBay that had holly, wreaths, Santa heads, boots, stars, bells, snowmen, candy canes and a Santa. I figured, how hard can it be to make some pretty chocolates? Just melt the chocolate, put some colouring in and then put it into the moulds in layers... easy... right?

Well, I wasn't completely wrong. Turns out you've got to also think about things like how to get the coloured chocolate into the right places in the mould and exactly what colouring to use...

So as the hot cross buns start hitting the stores, here are the 4 key learnings from my first attempt at chocolate moulds - 'just' in time for Easter ;-)

Lesson Number One:
First thing is first. Realise that white chocolate is in fact not white. This is why I have purple and white chocolates in the photo and not pink. I had already realised that it would be impossible to get red without going to a cake shop and buying red colouring specifically (I couldn't be bothered to pack up Jnr Pink and go to a cake shop just for red colouring....), so I had accepted that pink was the best I could do and figured it would look christmassy enough when paired with green and/or white. Well. Turns out when you try to make pink using a cream coloured base, it goes purple. So there you go, lesson number one.

Lesson Number Two:
Use sauce bottles for the different colours of chocolate. It only took about 3 seconds for me to realise that using a spoon to drizzle the chocolate into the moulds in the right spot wasn't going to work. Luckily, for some reason I have accumulated a few sauce bottles over the years and discovered that these come in very handy. I had three on the go, with green, purple and yellow colouring.

Lesson Number Three:
Chocolate does not stay melted. I know, I know, Captain Obvious here, right? Well it just didn't occur to me that while I was filling the moulds, the chocolate inside the sauce bottles not being used would start to resolidify. At this point I found it rather handy to turn the oven onto 50 degrees Celcius, or 'Warm', and place the bottles inside while they were not in use. This served to keep the chocolate nice and liquidy.

Lesson Number Four:
Take photos of all the cool chocolates you make if you plan on blogging about it later... Doh!

Gingerbread Christmas Present Boxes

My lovely lil sister, Mrs Killer, would be rather devastated if I didn't make gingerbread for Christmas... I usually make gingerbread men but this year, I came across these gingerbread boxes in one of the free Coles recipe catalogues that I'll pick up every season for dessert inspiration.

I originally had grand plans of making everyone a decent sized present box each, say, around 7cm square... but after the first batch of gingerbread only yielded 3 boxes I re-evaluated... everyone got a little gingerbread box each instead! When I thought more about it anyway, I realised that people probably don't want THAT much gingerbread in one hit anyway, so a small box was a much better way to go. (And it meant much less work for me as well!)

One batch should make about 7 boxes (based on a 3 x 3 cm square box)

Ingredients:
Gingerbread:
 - 125 g butter
 - 1/3 cup sugar
 - 1/3 cup golden syrup
 - 3 cups flour
 - 1/2 tsp ground ginger
 - 1 tsp cinnamon
 - 3 tsp bicarbonate of soda
 - 1 egg
 - 2 tsp vanilla essence

Icing & Decorations:
 - 1 x paper square template to your desired size (I used a 3 x 3 cm template)
 - icing sugar
 - a couple tablespoons of butter
 - a couple tablespoons of milk
 - Christmas themed chocolates (Optional)

Method:
Step 1: Preheat oven to moderate (around 180degrees Celcius)

Step 2: Put butter, sugar and golden syrup in a saucepan and heat gently, stirring occassionally, until butter melts. Remove from heat and allow to cool.

Step 3: Sift flour, ginger and cinnamon together into a large bowl.

Step 4: Add sifted bicarbonate of soda to the cooled butter mixture and pour onto flour mixture.

Step 5: Add egg and vanilla and mix to a soft dough.

Step 6: Roll the dough out to a thickness of about 5mm.

Step 7: This is where you'll need your template and a long knife of some kind. Cut the dough into strips the using your template as a guide for spacing.

Step 8: Cut the strips into squares using your template as a guide for sizing. Repeat steps 5, 6, 7 until you run out of dough or have enough squares**.

**Note: You need 6 squares to make one box, so make sure your total number of squares is a factor of 6 (e.g. 6, 12, 18, 24 etc)

Step 9: Place squares onto baking trays and bake for around 10 minutes (keep an eye on them as it may be a little more or a little less depending on your oven). Remove and let cool on a wire rack.

Step 10: To construct the boxes, cream 1 tbs of the butter with 1 cup of the icing sugar. Add small amount of milk if needed. Add more icing sugar and milk as needed to get the right consistency - the mix has to be firm enough to stay where you want it rather than drip off the gingerbread pieces.

Step 11: Use a piping bag to pipe a strip of icing onto the edge of a gingerbread square and quickly push the edge of another square against it. Repeat this with each edge until you have a box with 5 sides.

Step 12: As these were Christmas present boxes, at this point I put Christmas themed chocolates into each box and then sealed the top. I also had 3 large boxes for the kiddies (these were my boxes before I decreased the size of the template...) and it was at this point that I piped their names onto the outside and decorated them with Smarties.

Step 13: Put the lids onto the boxes using the same method as Step 11. I then stuck a chocolate star on the lids as some basic decoration for the non-kiddie gingerbread present boxes.

Christmas Cornflake Wreath Cookies

This is first of my Christmas 2013 desserts and my favourite of the lot. Its the quickest and easiest one to make, is surprisingly delicious and somehow does the impossible by making a good looking green dessert...

Makes about 16 and takes about 20 minutes to make.

Ingredients:
 - 1/3 cup butter
 - 4 cups of little marshmallows
 - 6 cups of cornflakes
 - green food colouring
 - red(ish) round candy to decorate (I have a bottle of multi-coloured candies and yes, I was that anal that I went through and picked out the dark pink ones as the closest colour to red for berries... by all means, feel free not to do that! And if you think of a small and easy to find 'red' thing to use instead, please let me know!)

Method:
Step 1: Melt the butter in a small saucepan. Meanwhile, put the cornflakes in a large bowl and lay out baking paper on 3 or 4 baking trays.

Step 2: Add the marshmallows to the saucepan and keep stirring until the marshmallows have completely melted.

Step 3: Add the food colouring until you get the right colour.

Step 4: Working quickly, add the melted marshmallow mixture to the cornflakes and stir to combine.

Step 5: WARNING: This becomes tricky quickly as it is VERY STICKY!! I drafted the help of Mr Pink from here on, he decorated with the red candies, I sculpted the wreaths...

Spoon (as best you can considering how sticky it is...) clumps of the mixture onto the baking trays leaving a hole or making a hole in the middle.

Step 6: Drop the red candies randomly onto the wreaths.

Step 7: To help the cookies set, place them in the fridge for 10 min or so. Meanwhile, go pick at the leftovers in the marshmallow-y cornflake-y bowl!