Happy Birthday Dad

  

Today is my Dad's birthday and I thought I would try to make him whisky fudge for a change.

I followed the recipe through this pin

 Combining condensed milk, butter, sugar and syrup
(I used golden syrup I didn't know what glucose syrup was  :) )

 Sugar dissolved, increase heat and stir constantly for 10-15 minutes

 Until you have a very lovely caramel coloured mixture.  Soft ball on the thermometer (I love my new thermometer no more weird testing of dropping into water and seeing if it makes a ball - so many failed attempts!)

Remove from heat and add chocolate and whisky.  I  put aside a little bit without the whisky as I don't like it and it tasted GOOD!

 Spread out in a prepared tin.  Fridge for one hour.

Wrap up in a little bag with some ribbon and give to your victim...haha this was STRONG.  That's all my Dad said.  Less whisky next time I think!  Or none at all :) 

OoOoOoOoOoOoOo

I also got a new toy from one of my favourite online shops Cox and Cox so really wanted to try it out.  

Firstly I made ganache

 I heat up some double cream

 Poured it over chocolate to melt

 Then whisked it together with some vanilla extract and covered it in clingfilm until cooled

 Meanwhile I melted candy melts and poureed it into my new moulds.  I swirled it around before tipping out excess onto greaseproof paper

 My moulds are very shallow and the candy melts didn't pour out as easily as they were supposed to so if anyone has a child they may recognise this - it's the syringe type device you get with children's Nurofen. I have tons of these in my drawer and it came in very useful to remove the excess candy melts from my moulds :).  I used a Pampered Chef scraper to remove the excess from the top of the moulds.

I then left this for a while to harden.

Next I filled up a squeeze bottle with the cooled ganache.  I piped it on top of the hardened candy melts in my moulds.

 And left this to harden for 35 minutes

Once the ganache was set I melted more candy melts and covered the top of the moulds.  Again I used the scraper to remove the excess from the top of the mould.  Next time I think I would pipe the candy melts on top so they would be neater.  

I  left these to set overnight.

 In the morning I removed the ganache-filled chocolate lollipops and used the 6 and 1 for my Dad's homemade birthday present.  I didn't take photos of the other numbers because I forgot but a few of them broke anyway.  I think I will need to stick to chocolate lollies not filled lollies because the moulds are shallow but not bad for a first attempt.  I couldn't see many recipes for chocolate moulds that were not just melting chocolate and re-setting in moulds.  I don't see the point in that :) Anyone have any good recipes for chocolate moulds?

The recipe I followed for these came from this pin  

More chocolate gifts can be seen here