It wouldn't be the holiday season without chocolate! From festive parties, to small family gatherings, or maybe just enjoying a quiet moment with someone you love, chocolate is a great addition to your holiday season. Each year, we love to share some of the fun and creative holiday products that we come across from the fabulous chocolatiers and chocolate makers we know in the fine chocolate industry. Here are just a few of the great examples we found this year!  This is definitely NOT an exhaustive list, or we'd be writing this blog post well past New Year's Day!

Chocolate making is a passion. If you get any chocolatier or chocolate maker talking about chocolate, get comfy because you will probably be there awhile. And you will also learn a lot. We love to “geek out” about chocolate, everything from flavor profile of beans, to chocolate making equipment, to trends in decorating techniques, we just love it all. And it’s this love and passion that sustains us through the tough times – the days when business slows, or your latest batch didn’t work and you have to start all over again, or getting the permits to open your factory is taking FOREVER

Place the cream and brown sugar into the saucepan and stir over medium heat until blended, then allow to cook to 112℃. As always when cooking sugar, periodically wash down the sides of the pan to prevent uncontrolled crystallization. At the end of cooking, stir in the browned butter and vanilla.Pour the hot mixture carefully into a stand mixer and mix until creamy and smooth. The fudge will look shiny at the beginning and will start to look dull as it is ready to come out.Pour into your prepared pan and allow to cool before cutting. Serve as is, or enrobe in chocolate.

Chocolate can very difficult to work with – it can lose its temper easily if it’s not treated just so. Then your bars or bonbons just won’t look the way you want them to. Ever been around a toddler? Temper is a mild way of putting it. Did you know it’s possible to completely ruin someone’s life by giving them their water in the blue cup instead of the green cup? Or, I don’t know, asking them to put on PANTS? Oh you can. Just like chocolate gets totally fussy and unstable if its fatty acid crystals are anything less than Form V. This relates to a process called tempering, which uses heat and motion to help the fatty acid crystals line up into one stable mass.

And as much as we would like to have infinite patience with our kids, when you’ve asked someone nicely to put their shoes on ten times, by the eleventh time your temper is probably going to rear its ugly head. Speaking of temper, this is probably one of the most frustrating skills for chocolatiers and chocolate makers to learn. Yes, you can buy a tempering machine that keeps things running smoothly for you, which you will probably do if you are planning to scale your business. But you also have to understand the basics to know what you are looking for, and that starts with learning to temper by hand. And in those times where you practice, practice, and practice some more, you will have many experiences where your chocolate looks dull, or develops white splotches called bloom. Or it just won’t have the snap we are looking for. You will need to have patience and keep working at it. Eventually, those fatty acid crystals will fall in line. Too bad we can't always say the same about our kids!

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