A Uniquely Local Review
One of the many perks of running a gift experience business is getting to try all the amazing experiences we have on offer so when York Cocoa House invited myself and my daughter along to try out their Chocolate Bar Making Experience, we were both very excited.
The one hour and 15 minutes Chocolate Bar Making at York Cocoa Works kicks off with some interesting facts about cocoa and its origins – have you ever thought about where chocolate comes from? I know I hadn’t so to learn about the cocoa bean and the processes it goes through to become the chocolate we all know and love was fascinating.
While we learned about the composition of white, milk and dark chocolate we got to try a generous portion of all three before making our decisions about what chocolate to use in our own bars.
Once we’d decided on milk, dark or white chocolate it was time to discuss flavourings and toppings and my goodness what a choice you have. We resisted the urge to go full out Willy Wonka and made some relatively sensible choices. I decided on milk chocolate with gold balls and salted caramel pieces, my daughter chose dark chocolate with marshmallows and smarties.
Choices made it was time to get making our bars. The first step of the bar making process was breaking the chocolate up into the right size pieces for tempering. Next we learned about tempering the chocolate. Tempering has to be done at the right temperature for the right amount of time and for this we used…..a hairdryer!! Bet you weren’t expecting that! Apparently on the right heat setting the humble hairdryer is the perfect tool for tempering the chocolate. Who knew?!
After tempering the chocolate through several stages of heating then mixing, then heating, then mixing it was at the right consistency and temperature for pouring into the mould and adding the all important extras.
Once we were happy with our bars toppings it was into the fridge to set for 20 minutes.
On this experience you make a bar with 200g of chocolate. I’m not sure if you’ve ever visualised 200g of chocolate but it’s a lot of chocolate for your money. Once poured and set in the fridge you come out with a very decent size chocolate bar.
We took the opportunity to sample some of the delicious chocolate drinks on offer in the York Cocoa House café while we waited for our bars to set. I had the most delicious chocolate espresso which guaranteed I would not be falling asleep any time soon and my daughter had a 70% quite dark hot chocolate which she declared was the best hot chocolate she’d ever had.
We had such a fun afternoon together and our finished bars looked and tasted amazing!
Reviewed by Rachel Marshall