Black and White Truffles

Right around when I really started to get onto my pastry craze, I learned quickly that the only way I would be able to justify the time and resources I spent, was if I made the excuse that I wanted to give them away to other people. So, now, everything's become a reason for celebration. Helped us move some furniture? Have some cookies! End of the school year? Take some brownies! Got a new cat? Have a biscuit! You get the basic idea.

When my Dad told me in January that he would be switching jobs the following July, I almost immediately got him onboard with me giving boxes of truffles to all of his coworkers, and spent the next 4 months leading until I returned home figuring out new designs, flavors, and the basic logistics of who to give what.

These weren't the truffles I ended up giving them, but they're my first experimentation with the truffle exteriors using both dark and white chocolate, which I did shortly after I ripped the truffle molds out of their packaging, after literally waiting on my sofa watching the door for the deliveryman.

These were a bit time intensive, hence there only being four, but its always nice to push yourself to accomplish chocolatier-grade work at home.

Happy Hunting!

- Neha x

A Brief Compilation of Roses

As much as I want to call my Wilton cake class a waste of time (and money, they're so expensive!) it was worth it just to be taught in person how to create an icing rose! YouTube and the rest of the internet is as good as a class as any (and free), but I never would have tackled this technique on my own. It just seems so complicated! Which instantly makes it one of the best cake decorating techniques to use if you want something instantly gorgeous, but easily achievable. 

They tend to look really fancy and romantic at times, but I love making these as birthday gifts just because they're so pretty and you can get away with making and giving away just a few. 

I was experimenting with the concept of adding food coloring to piping bags when frosting cupcakes, and tried it out on the roses with phenomenal results. It looks like you did twice the work, but in just half to time! I don't have a diagram, but if you're using a piping bag, put a stripe of heavily pigmented frosting corresponding to the top edge of the leaf tip. Then carefully place the rest of the white frosting in the piping bag, and proceed as usual! You could always just place a stripe of food coloring, but the results aren't as vivid.

And this isn't the best formatting, but if you scroll up to the second picture, you can see that you can get a similar rose effect by taking a Wilton 1M tip and piping a swirl starting at the center and going outward! That method looks especially stunning when done all over a cake. And did I mention that it's super simple?

I know this isn't a typical food blog post, but bare with me! I have tons of stuff that I have to somehow try and roll out on here logically...if I even should do that at all.

And this is why you should never start documenting your hobby on social media after you've already started doing it. For years.

Happy Hunting!

- Neha x

Chocolate Leaves + a mini intro :)

If you're anything like me, you're probably really wondering about the name of this blog. Chocolate-My-Heart. Grammatically confusing? Check. Oddly, un-Neha-like, whimsical and romantic? Check, Check. And what does it mean??

Well to take it back to high school awkwardness for a bit (everything seems to lead back to high school awkwardness), I decided to get a tumblr account in 2008, when I was 14. My best friend and I both had chocolate related AIM usernames (oh the 2000's), and she suggested "Why not Chocolatemyheart?". I wasn't crazy about it, but I'm terrible at names and titles, and wanted to get on with it, so ChocolateMyHeart it was! And then tumblr ended up being the first place I started food blogging, even though the audience for it was terrible.

Flash-forward to my internship at the Public Defender's office this year, and I started to show the lawyers and other interns my stuff. Only to realize that one should never have a portfolio alongside their diary. So my friend, Carinna, who I have to thank for her incredible faith in me, decided to start pushing me into developing my talents into a business and creating real social media and professional-standard portfolios.

She originally wanted me to make her wedding cake, and while that didn't pan out, she thought "ChocolateMyHeart" was original and perfect for a wedding cake designer. And I mentioned that I'm terrible of thinking up names and titles in general right?

As unusual as the name still seems to me at times, it's oddly fitting. To say that I love chocolate is an understatement. I'm constantly doodling ways (see: my poli sci lecture notebooks) to manipulate it, use it as decoration, mold it to add that extra "oomph" to whatever I'm planning on making. It was my first introduction into blending art and food together, and as corny as I feel admitting this, it captured my heart and hasn't let go ever since.

But back to the pictures, I remember reading about the technique used to make chocolate leaves before leaving to go run errands, and my family was barely out of the garage before I had already raced back inside the house to start these up. They're really simple to make, just melt some chocolate (temper it preferably), and then use a brush to spread it onto a clean leaf. Leave it (leaf, haha get it) to dry and then peel the leaf off of the chocolate. I like to fill the veins with white chocolate or brush them with luster dust.

Happy Hunting!

- Neha x