Homemade Chocolates - GUEST POST

My name is Jill, I'm a Mum to 2 girls and I have the most delicious 3 year old Grandson. I have been crafting and creating things for as long as I can remember, with my main passion being card making which I've done for the last 4 years. With money being tight I am always on the look out for ideas for cheap handmade gifts, which seem to be appreciated a lot more than shop brought ones.

I decided to dabble in chocolate making after a friend of mine told me all about her unsuccessful Easter egg making with moulds brought from QVC, which were the rigid ones. I just had to try it out myself, but with silicone moulds ... I figured these would be easier and searched EBay for the cheapest around, which brought me to www.siliconemoulds.com - so with my son-in-law's 30th birthday approaching we (my daughter and I) thought handmade chocolates would be a good thing to put in his party favor bags and help keep the costs down!

I can't do anything easy though and these chocolates had to have different flavoured centre's in. That was the biggest mission I had - finding a fondant crème recipe. Google is a fabulous thing and after hours of trawling the internet I found the one I liked the look of, which also told you how to make different flavours http://www.wrenscottage.com/kitchen/recipes/candy/creamfondant.php.

It's turned into a bit of an obsession - and close to 400 chocolates later I still have a passion to make more. I've just sold some of my rubber stamps to help finance the purchase of 3 new moulds and have brought the ingredients ready to make 4 new flavours when they arrive .... brandy crème's, raspberry crème's, fudge and almonds! Of course I'm going to need a few more mould's so that I can tell the difference between each flavour (well that's what I've told my hubby ;) !)

I've had a few requests for boxes of chocolates for gifts and have been approached by a couple of friends to make chocolates for their wedding favors but that's still under discussion at the moment.

The biggest compliment I've received was from my son-in-law's Dad who said my chocolate's were as good as Thornton's!

 

 

Jill uses the 24 chocolate truffle mould in the photos above - which is a semi sphere. We also do a larger version of the same mould which is called the 15 bonbon. Our other chocolate moulds can be found following this link. We are due to add a number of new chocolate moulds to our collection in the coming weeks.