Christmas Week!

I just love Christmas. People who see me in November probably think I’m a grinch but I just hate EARLY Christmas. It shouldn’t be months-long. But I love it when it’s here! In my family, my brother’s birthday is a week before The Big Day. We usually try to keep them separate – so I don’t get into the mood until about 6 days before. Which is NOW! I had a GREAT weekend – we got a tree, we got some Christmas Meat, had a great time out with Laird, and the neighbours’ house (which I can see from my kitchen window) looks like this:

Yesterday I made my customary Christmas chocolates – only this year they weren’t customary at all; I actually managed to temper chocolate this year and so I’m way beyond my basic bark. Plus, I made a huge batch of ganache and used it to create a pile of centers which I then dipped in various ways.

For those who don’t know, this is ganache:

It’s belgian chocolate melted into heavy cream. This is what’s inside truffles. It’s like the inside of a Lindt chocolate… only better. I kind of made way too much so had to come up with ways to use it. For instance:

This is a layer of ganache with a layer of skor and peanut butter bits, coated on one side with tempered dark chocolate and on the other with melted milk wafers.

This one is a layer of ganache, with a layer of melted mint chocolate chips, topped with green chocolate wafers and milk wafers on the other side.

Here we’ve got ganache bottomed with melted peanut butter chips and coated in cocoa powder to keep the ganache from being sticky.

And these? These are the ugliest, most insanely delicious caramels you will ever see, taste, or even hear about. It’s a layer of ganache, a layer of caramel lightly salted with kosher salt, topped and bottomed with milk chocolate wafers. When I cut them they exploded so I had to dip the bottom 3/4 of them in more chocolate to hold it all together… so essentially they’re double-dipped. Holy crap. They’re so good.

On the right above is a layer of ganache embedded with pretzels and skor bits, double-sided with white chocolate. Top left are more caramels.

CARNAGE.

This is the box of edges.. the “ugly” chocolates. I’ll be taking these to work :)

Nom.