nowlistening to "Where is my mind" by Pixies

Thursday the 21st I will be attending an event with CASA in Denver. I am preparing samples to offer, among sea salt caramel I will have caramel passion fruit ganache, Cabernet Sauvignon dark chocolate ganache and more. I am looking forward to help make this event even more successful.

Made With Love July Event Giveway

A really fun giveway From The Reynolds Mom. Tons of fun handmade stuff, reviews and more. Make sure to stop by Tomorrow Monday the 18th for a chance to win. Our Signature vegan sea salt caramel and nougat are part of the prizes :-)

Making vegan white chocolate, take 4

I am pretty sure this is my fourth batch of vegan white chocolate, anyway I think it gets better and better everytime :-) This one (still going into the melangeur) taste like one of my childhood white chocolate bar, haha, amazing how smells and tastes can bring back memories in a blink.
I am also working on vegan truffles and chocolates, since that was my original plan, to turn some of my non vegan old recipes into vegan one, and thats why I began making my own chocolate. Sarah Amorese at Piece, Love & Chocolate would love to have more vegan items for their store, so I am on a mission to create few flavors just for her, she is an amazing friend.
These are the trio I create this weekend, well my weekend starts today so potentially I have 2 more days to create few more, yeahhhh!

From Left to right, Vegan milk with vanilla and touch of cardamom, vegan white with chai spices, vegan milk with tahini and sesame seeds. My favorite is the vanilla one, it as a great aroma.

Vagan White Chocolate

Chocolate making requires time, batch after batch, finding the right formula, the one that works for you, not an easy task, an expensive one too.
Rewarding as well.
This is the third batch of the white vegan chocolate. The first one was not quite right, the second I used a fermented soy milk powder, which I was very excited to try, but imparted a strong flavor to the chocolate, now the beauty of white chocolate it's neutral (most of the time) flavor that gives the chocolatier room to play with delicate flavors, this one is not one of those!
So back to the testing, since it takes over 12 hours to whip up a batch of chocolate, time is not on my side, so I had to do an overnight one. Set up everything right after I came thru the door from work, so it could be ready by 5:00 the next morning, in time for me to temper it and get ready for work.
This time I used a different formula and double the amount, because I need more to experiment with my chocolate vegan bars, I also used the organic non deodorized cocoa butter (Origin Peru'). One of my favorite chocolate is El Rey and they use undeodorized cocoa butter for their white chocolate, is one of the best white chocolate I have ever had (pre-vegan age :-)), it smells and taste like rain forest, hearty and luscious, definitely it can stands on its own! Anyway I would love to recreate a flavor close to that, that is why I am using the undeodorized cocoa butter. It might turned out it is too strong to stand without the dairy tones, and maybe the soy doesn't quite do the job, what I would like is to find a good rice milk powder (they mostly sell mixes) because I think it would e a good candidate.
For now I will keep experimenting.
Will do a testing this afternoon to see how this one turned out.
Cross fingers :-)

Making vegan chocolate bars

The Chocolate making adventure continues, it is fun and frustrating at the same time. Vegan confecitions are tricky to make, especially ones that are worth eating but this journey has been also very rewarding, thanks to my wonderful customers that never fail to let me know how much they appreaciate my efforts to create vegan treats, I am very very greateful for them.
So I have been making few batches of vegan milk and white chocolate, and experimenting with various bars, mostly milk with white fillings, like Chai, strawberries and puffed crunchy millet and today a white pistachio filling.
The flavor profile is good but it will require more work and more time to develop a line that I will be comfortable putting on the market.
Again if I had more time, but have to work with what I have and make the best of it.

Vegan chocolate making, first try.

This weekend I did my very first batch of Vegan milk chocolate. Used half dose of the formula, since I figure the melangeur will probably needs to be conditioned.
The end result is not too bad but it definatelly needs some improvments. The flavor profile is little bit off, now I know that it needs couple of days to mature and to settle, but the sweetness in general is a bit off. I am assuming is the dairy free milk powder I used, is a soy free type and has a slightly lingering sweetness, that I dont like. The texture is good, but I would rather have something little bit creamier.
I have order a soy based vegan milk powder mix, I want to experiment and see if I can get the creaminess I want. I will be trying rice milk powder as well, but one thing at a time.
Mother's day approaching and I have still few orders to complete, I will be spending some time at the kitchen this week, and I will be visiting the Colorado Chocolate Festival on Saturday. After that I will be experimenting a lot more with chocolate making, even though my vegan live is going very well and I might be really busy really soon :-) Be careful what you wish for right!