Have you ever had a picture in your head of something you needed to make just circling around, prodding you into action until you actually DO it?
Yea, welcome to my stream of consciousness most of the time! Last fall, just before holiday season erupted, I had an image of a chocolate covered baklava piece. In my brain it was like a chocolate covered caramel, but having baklava inside.
Knowing I would not have time to dive into this adventure at the time, I put a conscious pin in the thought to come back to this spring.
About a month ago, I reached out to a friend and asked if he wanted to experiment with me. Neither of us has worked with choclate before..the melting..the tempering..the dipping…all foreign to us.
The one thing I did know was that the pieces needed to be small, so I made up a batch of my micro sized pieces that are about 1 inch square. The flavor was walnuts with dried apricots.
The day before our dipping adventure, I decided to take a stroll around the local thrift store. Imagine my surprise when on their electronics shelf was a brand new chocolate melting machine…exactly what I needed to do this project..for only $5!! It was like the universe was giving me a green light for the project.
Can I say that this dipping baklava in chocolate took forever because we were so new at the heating, cooling, and all the steps? Since we didn’t have one of those dipping fork-y things, we improvised with a plasic fork, but broke off one of the teeth for the excess chocolate to drip thru.
We also expereimented with wax paper lined cookie sheets vs. parchement paper. We wanted to know which paper would release better. Parchement won.
In the end, I sent out a flurry of packages to people to taste and give me feedback. Over 25 packages were sent all over the united states. Feedback was mostly good. I need to work on the syrup ratio. Some baklava were still crunchy and intact, but some have leaked syrup thru the chocolate shell and was a bit soggy on the inside.
I don’t think I have seen people so excited to try one of my experiments! It was delightful for me to send out little treats to people! That’s my happy place: feeding people!
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