Bruges Chocolate Making Experience: For someone who loves chocolate as much as I do, this afternoon was the very best. We had the opportunity to do a delicious 2 1/2 hour chocolate making workshop with our daughter, Mikayla. This is a must do if you’re in Belgium and you love this incredible treat.

First Step? Use high quality chocolate. We used Callebaut with 54.5% Cocao.

Next, we tempered the chocolate to get a beautiful, professional chocolate coating on it without adding additional ingredients.

This is the process of melting the chocolate in a double boiler to a specific heat, and then cooling and reheating it to a very specific temperature.

Tempering is an additional step I never realized was important. It allows the chocolate to stay hard at a cool room temperature versus melting or needing to be stored in the refrigerator. It’s important to use a thermometer if you want this done right. Below is our instructor instructing.

Next, we coated our individual molds completely with the tempered chocolate, inverting the filled molds and allowing any excess chocolate to drip back into the bowl. This is when things started to get really fun!

No offense, but some of us were neater than others. I won’t mention names. Below is a lined mold, ready to be refrigerated. As the chocolate hardened, we worked on making a Ganache filling with dark and milk chocolates, along with cream and a touch of honey. We also had a few sauces like Caramel as well as mixed nuts and fruit available.

Once our molded chocolates were hard enough, we filled them about three quarters full with ganache using a piping bag and then added fruit, nuts, and/or a choice of sauces.

We topped the molds off with additional tempered chocolate, leveling the top carefully with a straight metal spatula, and returned the molds to the refrigerator to set.

See below our finished products. What a fantastic experience.

Quick notes: This is a fun but pretty basic class. If you’ve already worked with chocolate extensively, you may not necessarily learn anything new, but you will have fun. For more information on our itineraries, feel free to email us at dtgainor@gmail.com or visit Global Getaways to learn more about who we are and how we work.