Halo folks, I’m Back!
It was a dark and stormy evening in Cape Town. On Friday past, I attended the ‘Desserts made Easy’ course at the Lindt Chocolate Studio in the Old Cape Quarter in the Foreshore. As you step into the store, you are immediately overwhelmed by the warm chocolate aroma emanating form the vast assortment of Lindt chocolates on offer. Many a time i resisted the urge to run around like a kid in a candy store stuffing my face with every type of chocolate i could find, but alas i remembered that I was all grown up and I would have to pay for everything. Being sent to jail for stealing chocolate would not really help my prison cred.
The course lasts approximately 2 hours and involves a demonstration of 4 easy-to-make Lindt chocolate desserts. Space for the course is limited to approximately 8 people which allows for an intimate evening of Lindt dessert making discovery.
We started off making this very simple soft chocolate tart; with the chef showing us how to make the sweet dough base as well as the chocolate filling.
This was followed by a really light and easy to make chocolate mousse covered with chocolate shavings. As mentioned, while the course is more of a demonstration than everybody being hands on with the dessert making, the chef provided many opportunities for attendees to assist him at various points.
After the mousse, we were also shown how to make the 2 classic desserts (and 2 of my favourites) – The Chocolate Fondant (with a salty caramel white Lindt chocolate ball) and The Chocolate Soufflé. I myself have struggled greatly trying to make both of these, normally ending up with chocolate fondant pudding or a chocolate custardy eggy inedible soufflé, but after having attended the course, I have now become aware of my mistakes and will correct as necessary. One thing is certain though, after having completed this course and observed how easy it is to make the fondant and the soufflé, restaurants are overcharging for these desserts quite atrociously. With all the effort and the ingredients, at most, these desserts should cost (with significant markup) R20. Instead, I have seen these being offered as high as R60 at certain restaurants.
I definitely recommend this course for any chocolate or dessert enthusiast. The chef was well spoken, friendly and able to answer many of our questions. The instructions for making the dessert was quite easily to follow. He also provided quite a large number of simple tips which can speed up or simplify many of the trickier parts. He did talk about a more hands-on course that was being developed, but no timeline was mentioned.
And finally to round off, if you are interested, you can find a list of the courses on offer with branches both in Cape Town and Johannesburg here: The Lindt Chocolate Studio
Visual Deliciousness 