As laid out in my previous two posts (here and here), Mummy and I do love a good adventure.  With this in mind and knowing that I would be home on certain dates, I bought us a chocolate making class via Virgin Experiences.  It was a bit of a random gamble but I went with My Chocolate in the end, and I honestly couldn’t have picked better!

Our day started incredibly early because we were unable to book their Brighton class, and ended up going to London’s N1.  This meant a couple of trains with a much earlier than usual start due to works being carried out on various lines and diversions being in place.

Even with all the faff of getting there, and despite the taxi driver putting the fear of holy wotsit into us about walking around on our own, this turned out to actually be an excellent location.  It was not scary at all and if we had been boring and stayed in Brighton, we would have missed one of the coolest things I’ve seen in an age…

Someone with far too much time on their hands but a great sense of community spirit, had knitted (or crocheted?) things for the Royal Wedding!  I kid you not!  This was one of the best things I’ve seen in London, ever!  Helped no doubt by the fact it was a gorgeous sunny day!

I mean, have you ever?!  How do people even start to think of things like this?  Where do you get the patterns?  I can’t even knit a scarf, despite having tried a number of times!

Finally it was time to get to class, and learn about chocolate and how to make it and such.  We really had no idea what to expect, except that it may be a little messy.  The instructions had said to come along not wearing white, and to have sleeves that pushed up!

I really am actually struggling on how to write this because it was just so much fun that I really want to do it justice!

We started the day with a beautifully laid out and clean table.

When most people had arrived (because naturally there was that one party who pitched up ridiculously late) and we were all finished taking selvies…

… we were introduced to our Chocolate Guru, Kate!

She was fabulous and I can’t imagine having someone nicer to have spent the morning learning chocolate things with.  She was also really great in making provision for my nut allergy.  In fairness, so were the people taking the class.  I like nice people!

First up we got to make giant chocolate buttons.  Kate showed us how, and then we copied her techniques.  We were given both dark and milk chocolate to play with and I think we all tried one of each.  It was actually much harder than it looked, but great fun to attempt!  I now know that if someone gives me two types of melted chocolate, I can do pretty things!

So can Mummy…

Next up was making ganache truffles.  This was a bit more work but very funny!  We had to mix chocolate and cream and stir it until it had solidified.  Then, we had to work it into a piping bag and create these little lumps of truffle…

Don’t they look dreadful?!  Well, my half do.  Mum is good at piping so basically any in the picture that don’t look like poop were piped by her.  The rest are mine.  Oops!

Next up was to decorate the poop truffles!  This was why we needed aprons and had been told not to wear white!  It was SOOOOO messy and even more fun!  You could be all arty and know that you could eat it all later.  What wasn’t to love!?

We had strawberry chocolate curls, white chocolate flakes, honeycomb, little gold pattern thingies, and of course, lots and lots of runny chocolate to dunk things into!  There was no rules.  You just got to put stuff together.

On top of that, we had been supplied with marshmallows and fudge so we could get a really good selection going!

I am very proud of our efforts.

But more so that Mum made it through the whole thing without eating any of hers!!!!

After a quick talk about the origins of chocolate, and a blind taste test where unsurprising to anyone who knows me it came out that I have expensive taste in chocolate, it was time to pack up our beautifully crafted sweet treats and head onto our next adventure.

Even packing up was fun though!  They had a supply of bags and boxes so that you could make them into pretty gifts (which everyone was horrified at the idea of!) or in our case, take them all the way home without messing them up!

Thank you so much to Kate and the team for making Mum’s birthday treat such a memorable event.  If you haven’t done one of these yet, you really should and I would highly recommend My Chocolate.  It was £64 for the two of us and it was money incredibly well spent.