Christmas Chocolate!

We've made some significant progress in the area of chocolate presentation and candy making.  In this shot are truffles, toffee, almond bark, and peanut butter cups.  These are for various friends and family we're seeing or sending to this year.  Shout out to http://www.cocoasupply.com for having great prices on beans and cocoa butter, that let us afford to make somewhere around 25lbs of chocolate this last month.  In fact, the chocolate pictured is only a portion of what we've made so far - the fancy looking part.

During this, we've made some new chocolate recipies and tried new things.  It's been a great chance to experiment.  I plan to write up our recipes later as a separate post.  For now, have a merry Christmas, happy holidays, and a great New Year!

Chocolate Making Supplies

We learned how to make great chocolate from scratch from chocolatealchemy.com

We've got a special occasion coming up, so I bought enough cacao beans (20 lb!) to make several batches (shipping was expensive).  I'll try to post pictures of the process and/or product(s) later.

Flour milling

We milled some flour today!  This time, we used our fairly cheap hand grinder, so it took a while. The kids helped a little, but turning the crank was pretty tough for them.

Starting with about 4 cups(?) of hard red wheat berries (the seeds), we milled and sifted down to about 1.2 cups of fine flour, several cups of coarse flour, and maybe a half cup of coarse bran.  We've been making 100% whole wheat bread (with gluten flour) in our bread machine lately, so we'll try for a loaf from a mix of coarse and fine flour.