Anywhoo, this morning I took the most wonderful cooking class at the Sacramento Co-op. It was Valentine's chocolate desserts. My sister-in-law took it too and we had an absolute blast. I had never taken a cooking class before so I wasn't sure what to expect. It turned out to be a mixture of lecture, demonstrations, and hands-on cooking. To start, our instructor, Jill, demonstrated how to make a truffle filling. She went into detail about the various ways to select chocolate, melt it and work with it. While we waited for the mixture to melt, she told us about the origins of chocolate and how it is processed. She also passed around various types of chocolate for us to sample and compare.
Next she demonstrated the chocolate cake recipe while we sipped hot chocolate and ate cherry chocolate scones. At this point I was starting to feel a little icky. It was a lot of chocolate to be sampling at 10:30 am. The Chocolate Pot de Creme demonstration was next and of course we got to sample that too.
Then the fun part came. We each got to hand roll five truffles, dip them in chocolate, and take them home. It was nice and messy and in the end, mine turned out pretty well.
After the truffles, came the making of the chocolate cherry scones. This we did as a table. We each took turns pouring in the ingredients, mixing, and preparing the scones for baking. Once they were done we each took one home.
As if that wasn't enough, we then each frosted a chocolate cupcake with chocolate ganache frosting and decorated it. Oh we also got a glass of sparkling wine, because even though it was only noon, it was 5 o'clock somewhere!
Finally, we decorated our boxes to take home all our treats. It was a great class and I can't wait to take another one!
