Chocolate party!

In the midst of the cloud of smoke covering my town and seemingly my life... I set out to give a chocolate party for two generous women who paid lots of money to a great cause and won my donated party.

There were 10 women of all ages. One of which has a 94 year old mother who swears she has lived as long as she has because of two things. A screwdriver a day and as much chocolate as she can get a hold of daily. I like this woman and strive live as long as she.

The party was fun and the women attentive as I told the story of chocolate. After which we went into the dining room to dip and decorate the truffles I provided. Three flavors, double dark, orange flower and milk chocolate with peanut butter. This is where grown women turn into kids playing with mud pies! After dipping all the truffles, with chocolate still in their bowls, they began sticking their fingers in to it to eat the remains. Then someone said they needed some dipping material... "HEY, how about the veggies?" So the veggies meant to be dipped in this delicious cheesy dip came to the chocolate table and the results were amazing! The most popular veggie dipped in chocolate was the sweet yellow and red bell peppers, then the cucumber, the celery and last which was pointed out to ruin perfectly good chocolate was the broccoli. This was a first for me! I have had lots of fun things happen at these parties and almost without exception fingers go into the bowls no matter who the clients but the veggies?? Never...so a new chapter is born to my chocolate parties... one with great chocolate and fresh veggies... hmmmm

Try and try again

I am trying to get this posted on my web site www.chefany.com but it seems that we are having technical difficulties but we will keep on trucking as a famous singer once said...
Tonight we made nougat, marshmallows, graham crackers and ultimately S'mores... all homemade... ok well, class made but you know what I mean!
We made three different recipes for marshmallows and held a marshmallow throwdown... the recipe without the egg whites and without the honey won the test. Then came the fun part.
I took some imported milk chocolate placed it on the fresh out of the oven graham cracker, put a fresh gooey marshmallow on top and then put the whole thing in the oven for a few minutes. When the chocolate was sufficiantly soft then I pulled it out and torched the marshmallow for that dark crispy caramelized layer on top! YUM and YUM again... what fun and what a treat!
I am sugared out though and it is 11 pm and I still have to drive over the hill to my waiting bed... But I don't regret a single calorie :)

Ok so I have not kept up with this at all... I want to share all the years of knowledge that I have but I haven't been inspired to sit and write...until now... I saw Julie and Julia last night and it wasn't Julie's blog that inspired me but Julia Child's excitement about food and teaching people about food gave me the jump start I needed to get this thing rolling... I will make a promise to myself to write here about what I am teaching and what my students get out of my classes each day I teach them.. which is four days a week at this point... I hope that someone reads and learns something from this and am hoping to link it to my personal web page www.chefany.com