Valentine’s Day Chocolates

Sending out early Valentine’s Day wishes!  It’s Fat Tuesday/Carnival today and Ash Wednesday tomorrow, so I thought to get my fill of chocolates today while having our sweet, mini-Carnival celebration at home.

I made these chocolates last weekend.  They are made from almond-bacon butter toffee and enrobed in a mixture of semi-sweet and milk chocolate.  I ate a few pieces before enrobing in chocolate–oh boy, were they good!  The bacon flavor added another dimension, but didn’t scream out, “Here is bacon!!”  It was a great balance.

In case you haven’t made butter toffee before, it is basically 1 part sugar and 1 part butter heated to soft crack stage, around 298°F.  Then it’s poured onto a large pan or counter in a thin layer to cool.  It turns hard pretty quickly.  When cool, it is usually slathered with a thin layer of chocolate and covered with chopped nuts.  To serve, you break the big slab into irregular pieces.  In my case, I wanted to make enrobed chocolates out of squares instead of irregular pieces, so I had to work fast to cut out the squares before the slab completely hardened.

Right after making the almond bacon batch of toffee, I made a batch of toasted almond toffee.  I toasted the almonds, coarsely chopped the almonds, and then mixed them in with the toffee while the toffee was still hot.  The surface was a little lumpy before enrobing, and that showed through after enrobing!

But these are so, so good!  I can’t decide which are better, the almond bacon toffee, or the plain almond toffee.  In either case, I need to redo them and post the recipe!

I made some rough and tumble-style “mediants,” which are a dab of chocolate decorated with pieces of dried fruit and/or nuts.  I used only dried apricots this time.

Nothing beats chocolate!

You may also like

2 Comments

    1. I second that! Happy Valentine’s Day! Hope you got a chance to enjoy some chocolates yesterday, today, and everyday . . . .

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.