Making Your Own Cocoa Butter Colours

.Reading time 4 minutes.
Here’s a quenelle mould with a blend of orange, yellow and green.

My motivation for making my own cocoa butter: I used to buy coloured cocoa butter, but in addition to the price of each colour, I’d often end up having to pay a cost associated with shipping and customs, increasing the average price per bottle. To bring down the price, I would end up getting a few more bottles, which I likely did not need in the first place. The other issue with buying coloured cocoa butter is that most companies offer the same range of colours, so if you want something different you’ll have to mix your own colours anyways…So why not just start with primary colours and mix small batches?

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Making Chocolate Moulds (Using a 3D printer and Mayku Formbox)

.Reading time 3 minutes.

The idea for these chocolate bars came from Rachel and Jess at Hailed Coffee. In order for us to push forward and strive to be better, we need to be uniquely different. It’s important that we keep thinking and inventing. More often than not though, these ideas go straight to the bin and don’t ever get to the implementation/testing phase. This one was different! It started from our work on creating new flavours of chocolate bars. We had recently started testing a lemon crunch bar which led to a lemon, blueberry and meringue bar. Throughout the iterations, we thought about separating the crunch component and the flavour component. This led to the idea of making bars with ice cream flavours and crunchy, cone-like components. Better yet, what if these chocolate bars actually resembled an ice cream cone? Eureka!

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Kombucha at Home

.Reading time 11 minutes.

Probiotics! I started buying kombucha many moons ago while browsing the aisles of Whole Foods Square One when it first opened. With an array of supposed health benefits such as improved digestion and absorption of nutrients, strengthening immunity, to name a few, I was curious enough to try it and soon developed a taste for it. It was sweet, but not too sweet, and naturally fizzy – a healthy alternative to some of the sugary drinks that I crave now and then. Unfortunately, it always seemed too expensive to drink regularly, especially since kombucha is just basically sugar-sweetened tea, fermented with bacteria and yeasts. Megan and I used to make it, but not consistently. Now, with a new shared goal of trying to make everything ourselves, we have started brewing new batches every 8-12 days.

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Cloud 9

.Reading time less than 1 minute.

This dessert started with the idea to create a “floating cloud” look on a plate. It’s composed of an upside-down pavlova, topped with chantilly and pismaniye (halva floss). Hidden inside are fresh raspberries filled with a blended pate de fruit, macarons, toasted pistachios, and rose petals. Finished with a chocolate number “9” because…it’s not just any cloud, it’s Cloud 9.

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Macaron Recipe (Adapted from Pierre Hermé)

.Reading time 11 minutes.

I’ve tested many macaron recipes over the years. Overall, I’ve found that getting the right ingredients, understanding the techniques, and troubleshooting is significantly more important than the recipe itself (i.e. the slight differences in the ratios of the ingredients). Last week, we finally tested this recipe with a grade 11 student of mine making macarons for the first time. With some guidance, we had pretty good results. That’s when I know it’s time to share. For the sake of accuracy, we are not going to include any volumetric measurements for this recipe. Go get your scale!

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