Don't Forget Flowers For Mother's Day!!

Make sure you treat Mum this Sunday - just a gentle reminder for you all.

A Couple More............Whoops, we forgot to post!!

All done for another year!! Look out though for more of our chocolate flowers soon!! Thanks for reading guys.

EASTER 2010

We hope you had a fun, chocolate filled Easter! Here are some of our Easter creations for this year. 

Chocolate Work Comes Down

Phew! All that hard work, just for a day. We thought we would give you a peek of this years Valentine's creations before they get made into ganache. This year featured a 'wall of flowers' among the display. 

Happy Valentine's Day!

We hope someone special made your day, if not..............there's always chocolate!!!!

Easter Production Started

This time of year is always busy for a pastry chef! Just when you think the Christmas rush is over you are followed quickly with Valentine's Day and then Easter, not to mention demonstrations in March! So we have already started production of our hugely popular Easter range, our choccy chooks and piggies are some of our most popular creations. This means we have to start early and work methodically. Eggs next and we will keep you posted on the progress

MERRY CHRISTMAS FROM IAN & DARREN

Here are a few festive shots for you, we have been busy in the kitchen creating chocolate & sugar pieces to celebrate the season. We have elegant chocolate christmas trees (top & second), a cool santa with the shades on (third & fourth shots), our chocolate baubles and gingerbread house (next two) and finally our marzipan & chocolate snowballs and our mini chocolate trees. We hope you enjoy these pictures and we would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas. We are signing out for now but will post again before new year. Have fun!!!!!

Chocolate Work

We have been working with chocolate a lot this week, (probably why the weather has decided to get so hot!), and we are starting to get thoughts together for our Masterclass at the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival next year. We really want to impress the guests attending and are working on a plated dessert and chocolate display. This is just a sample of this weeks work.

P.S. can you guess which rubber mould was used for the picture at the top of this post??

My Boy Lollipop!!

We were tempering chocolate this week for another use and decided to make some cool different flavoured lollipops for petits four. To garnish we used some bits and pieces of mise en place that we had ready. Crushed honeycomb, freeze dried fruits and fresh pistachio nuts were just some of the different varieties we tried and judging by the reaction of the waitress, everyone was happy with the outcome!! These are easy to make so why not give them a go yourself?

Burch & Purchese Handmade Chocolates 1 - Salted Caramels

We appreciate the (careful) use of salt in the pastry kitchen, it balances flavour especially in very sweet confections. These chocolates are made with the highly recommended Murray River salt from Australia. A thick caramel is made, cooked to 145C, which gives a 'dropping' consistency. This is flavoured with the gorgeous pink crystals of salt and left to cool. We cast tempered Tarakan chocolate from chocovic, this is especially good for moulded chocolates as its high cocoa butter content gives high fluidity ensuring a thin mould. After the chocolate has crystallized we add the caramel and seal with more chocolate. Once turned out these chocolate are decorated with gold lustre and are ready for consumption. They have a great shelf life and are delicious as a petits four.

Burch & Purchese Chocolate Pieces 1 - Rusty Tools

We try to create unique pieces for our records. These 'tools' were made by filling homemade moulds with chocolate, we then set about creating the 'rusty' effect. This was achieved by rubbing the set tools with gold lustre and cocoa powder. We think it is a striking effect and perhaps these would be the perfect Fathers Day Gift? Tell us what you think........