Chocolates, Pralines and Petit Fours

A friend of mine organized a special course last Friday - it was a cooking course and as the title says - Chocolaterie! it is about making chocolates, pralines,truffels and small little cakes called petit fours. Oh what a delightful evening filled with the soft scent of chocolate! I have never eaten so much chocolate in my life in one sitting - at the end of the evening I felt really sick ;( - guess there is a thing as having too much chocolate.

I didn't have much time taking pictures of the whole preparation, partly I was busy cooking/preparing and partly I was a bit shy to take out my camera - in this case my mobile
phone to take the pictures. Of course I was the only one who has thought or dared to take some pictures - except for a journalist who was covering the whole event. Who knows I might even land in one of the local papers -- hmm? not really sure though. I didn't really buy that newspaper today so in case I was there, then I missed it already!
These are my groupmates - we really had a wonderful time doing all the preparation and cooking/baking together. Here are some of the yummy and the delightful treats we made - there were 11 of us in the course. Each group had 2 people except for our group with 3 in it. The reason for this was because we were assigned to do 2 recipes. After finishing all the cooking - we put all the finished products on the table-- yummy! This is one of the things we made. It was fine, I don't know if I was eating too much while cooking but I find the other chocolates/cakes where better than ours. One of my groupmate was such a riot, she wasn't too keen on being exact with the measurements. Nevertheless, we really had a lot of fun. She is actually an officemate of my friend and it's my first time to meet her that evening. Here she is as you can see. I think she just had too much chocolates..can you be tipsy from eating too much chocolates? Oh and we ate our chocolates with sparkling wine ;) that was probably a bad combination. The V. asked me if I could now do these things on my own at home - my answer is no. Some of the recipe require special gadgets and equipment that it would be too costly to do them just because I have some craving for them. Some are easy and I think they would make good christmas presents for 2009. The best thing about the whole experience is - first, I learned something new that evening and second, I had a wonderful time that evening especially after a hard day at work - (ok let's not just mention the chocolate shock I got later that evening!)

So let me end this post with these 2 nice quotations:

"There are four basic food groups-milk chocolate, dark chocolate, white chocolate, and chocolate truffles."

"Among life's mysteries is how a two pound box of chocolate can make a woman gain five pounds."