It was sometime last year that I first came up with the idea of combining two of my favourite things – choclate and Lego – but didn’t really know where to start. I knew I’d need some kind of mold, but never got around to working out the best way to make one.
And then I discovered Lego Ice Cube Trays and immediately knew they’d be perfect for what I wanted. Unfortunately, the Lego shop doesn’t sell the trays in the UK, but a quick search of eBay and I found one.
My plan was simple. Instead of filling them with water, I’d just use melted chocolate. And – much to my amazement and delight – it actually worked.
My Chocolate Lego did contain a few imperfections, but I think that just adds to the character.
The process was very simple:
1. Melt the chocolate. The best way to melt chocolate is in a bowl over a saucepan of boiling water. That way you can control the temperature so the chocolate melts evenly and won’t burn. You can use any chocolate for making your bricks, but I found dark chocolate works best simply because it’s harder than milk or white chocolate.
2. Spoon or pour the chocolate into the mold.
3. Use a plastic spatula to smooth the chocolate into the mold, making sure to push it into the corners. Make sure the chocolate is exactly level with the top of the mold to give the bricks a nice flat, even base.
4. Put it into the fridge to set. I recommend leaving it overnight to make sure the chocolate is solid all the way through. This will make it much easier to remove from the mold.
5. Once set, simply push your chocolate lego out of the tray. I found the bricks came out very easily as the tray is made of soft rubber. If you need to, use a sharp knife to trim off any excess chocolate from the bricks.
Building With Chocolate Lego
You may have noticed the obvious drawback of making chocolate Lego in this way. Because the bricks are solid, you can’t ‘click’ it together like real Lego. But this is chocolate, and even if you could click it together, you’d probably never get it apart anyway!
The best way to build with these bricks is simply to treat them like proper bricks – i.e. use a cement to stick them together. By ‘cement’, I do of course mean icing/frosting. Pretty much any icing will do, but why not try Simon’s recipe for chocolate fudge icing.
Taking it Further
Making Chocolate Lego this way is incredibly easy, and once you have a supply of bricks, there’s no end to what you can create. You could use different combinations of dark, milk and white chocolate – or even add a few drops of food colouring to white chocolate to make coloured bricks.
So why not get building and let us know what you come up with. There may even be a special prize if anyone manages to create a Chocolate Lego Dalek Cake…
My recent visit to Ireland yielded a few items- some of which were, of course, made by Butlers Irish.
Whilst enjoying a drink in one of their shops, I bought myself a Jameson’s Truffle bar, and then when I visited the Jameson’s distillery in Middleton I came across some individual truffles, also flavoured with Jameson’s whiskey, and (strangely)also made by Butlers Irish. Sounds like another chocolate face-off to me.
An obvious first observation is that the Truffles are somewhat ‘posher’ than the bar, as reflected in both quantity and price. The bar costs a little less than the box of truffles and contains six or seven segments, whereas the Jameson’s truffles box contains just four gold foil wrapped truffles nestling in little petits fours cases.
Both bar and truffles claim the same cocoa content (58%) and so it would be natural to expect that the two products would taste very similar. However this is plainly not the case. The bar is a fairly uniform texture, the truffle part being a little softer than the chocolate but nowhere near the texture of the truffle in the, errm, truffles.
The difference in texture with the four truffles was quite amazing. Because the truffles were individual balls sealed in chocolate, they seemed to retain a smooth moistness that the truffle bar just couldn’t approach. Consequently the truffles deliver a much fuller and more rounded taste than the bar. The chocolate used in the truffles seems darker, glossier and much more bittersweet than the stuff wrapped around the bar.
Although they do cost more, the truffles are so much tastier than the bar that it’s hard to believe that the two products are, essentially, cut from the same cloth. I don’t know if the fact that the truffles may be hand made (unlike the bar), but I know which one I preferred. The truffle bar is definitely a poor second.
This is another of the Klik samples sent to us by OhNuts.com.
The ‘Half’ in the name doesn’t seem to mean half-fat or half-sugar or even half-chocolate. Instead it seems to just refer to the half-speherical shape of these cute little truffles.
They’re vey small – about 1cm across – and pretty basic. White chocolate with soft truffley filling. But I’d hardly cally them “Gourmet”. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a chocolate that looks quite as much like it’s come off a production line as this. They look more like mass produced white plastic bullets than anything hand made.
Taste-wise, the white chocolate is pretty good – the closest comparison is probably something like Kinder. They’re a little sweet for my liking, but they’re just as moreish as the ‘pillows‘ I reviewed before. This 75g bag lasted me all day, but I did find myself eating them constantly without noticing.
I’m not sure I’d buy these and just eat them out of the bag, but I might buy several bags at once and either stick them in a big bowl to serve at parties or sprinkle them on top of a nice chocolate ice cream. Mmmm.
I’d like to thank the ladies who we on the Dark Sugars stall in Borough Market this weekend. Despite the fact they’d had a hard day’s work and were closing up, they still took time to have a quick chat about chocolate, and to allow me to try a couple of their truffles.
I was delighted to have been offered a slow-to-warm chilli truffle, but I was very chuffed indeed when they let me try a totally new (to me) flavour – Infused Tea truffle. It was as it should have been, sublimely blended flavours in a smooth, dark truffle, dusted with bittersweet cocoa. Scrumptious.
Looking at their website, I can see a fistful of unusual flavours I’d love to get my teeth into (gin and Lime and Dry Apple Cider & Cinnamon being just two. Perhaps they’ll save me the 75m round trip and let Chocoblog have a few samples? Maybe?
Please?
