Chocolaterie Wanders offers you the world's finest handmade gourmet chocolates.

Is it really the end of summer already? We are enjoying hot days here in the Washington DC area, luckily humidity is not too high and there aren’t many clouds in the sky.

The Holiday season is slowly coming up - our customers have certainly gotten into the mood already - we were surprised by many orders from you all last week and had to work some late hours already. To get into the exciting spirit we introduced our Tupelo Honey Sunflower confections in our newsletter:

Valrhona’s 64% Manjari, known for its bright and slightly tart red fruit flavors, is the base for this silky rich dark chocolate ganache subtly flavored with the rare and distinctive floral and spicy qualities of tupelo honey.  Finished in dark chocolate, each confection is topped with a handcrafted marzipan sunflower artistically decorated with dark chocolate and roasted cacao nibs.

We had fun tasting all kinds of different honeys for this ganache and finally settled on Tupelo honey. If you have never heard of Tupelo Honey, this is what Wikipedia says:

“Tupelos are valued honey plants in southeastern and Gulf Coast of the United States, producing a very light, mild-tasting honey. In northern Florida, beekeepers keep beehives along the river swamps on platforms or floats during tupelo bloom to produce certified tupelo honey, which commands a high price on the market because of its flavor”

During our tastings, it actually had a very distinct flavor and was able to stand up well against the intense flavor of Valrhona Manjari. In the end it went really well together.

Atop the honey ganache we placed a cut and hand-formed marzipan flower. The marzipan is colored with saffron - although a very strong spice the flavor is not detectable - and filled with a drop of dark chocolate and cocoa nibs.

The confection is very labor intensive and this is the reason for it being a limited edition. We may however create a confection with just the honey ganache … let’s see what you think!

Hey, sorry I didn’t write lately … the reason? -No time! We are so busy making chocolates. Believe it or not, but yesterday was the hottest day here out in Manassas (103F) and we were enrobing chocolates for 6 hours and finishing Pate de Fruit for another six. The air conditioning had a workout and so did we It is good to get in the groove again though, slowly the summer progresses and we are getting ready to prepare ourselves for the big season. Due to some exciting (and unforeseen) orders we did work until midnight in the past few days and next week is even more crowded with tasting appointments and more. More on that later in this post. Look at this:

Doesn’t this look good? It is a close shot of our ginger confections after cutting the ganache. Tomorrow we will enrobe the chocolates - I just had to grab the camera to take a picture and capture this. The pieces inside are candied ginger that we add to the ganache. The actual flavor does not come from the candied ginger though (those just give a little crunch and texture to the whole experience), but rather from the ginger root that we cut up and steeped in the cream before we make the ganache. The ginger praline is one of our summer flavors and while it tastes really good and refreshing, it will disappear from the menu in a few weeks to make space for some delicious winterly and Christmas-y flavors.

So, while I was looking for some older confectionery tools on ebay in Germany, I came across something that I thought I would never get my hands on: A set of tools to decorate and form confections like marzipan and nougats. Of course you can get that anywhere you say (and I also have a few versions out of plastic already) but this one is different. It is dated late 18th century and hand-carved from horn (rhino or similar). Tools like that where used back then, when there was no plastic to form - my first chef Josef Buecker (Vice-President of the Pastry Guild, Germany) told me about a tool-set like that and how good it was to work with the marzipan, because the tools would never stick to it and have no seam.

Since that night (2nd year of apprenticeship, it was about 10:30PM and we were modeling marzipan figurines) I always wanted to have tools like these. Since decades it is prohibited to make things like that out of horn and I never thought I would be so lucky to get them. But now I have my very own set of tools and they are in surprisingly good shape. They are very detailed and also very light in your hand - lighter than the plastic ones even. I will model some marzipan with it - just to try them out and to get the feel for them and I will probably be ending up putting them into a frame or sth… I am glad I found this piece of pastry and confectionery history

Out of our last newsletter, coming up in exactly one week is this:

Start your weekend off early with a complimentary chocolate and wine tasting at Cork and Fork in Gainesville, VA on Thursday, August 16^th from 6-9pm.  In addition, the Virginia Gateway community will be celebrating a “Midsummer’s Night of Music” with performances by New Day Rising and The Josh Burgess Band.

If you want to know exactly where we will be and what we are up to, why not subscribe to our newsletter? We promise you not to bombard you with too many emails (frequency is once a month) and we will keep your data private. You will be the first to know what we create next and who knows - maybe there will be some subscriber specials for the holidays?

Ah, legendary chocolates. I had high expectations for these delights … I love the chocolate they produce, but never had any of their chocolate confections, so on our trip to NYC we had to step by and check out their store, which is a little hard to find, but once you made it, it looks really nice, dark and welcoming …. “home-y” I would say, the bar is a nice touch too!

The staff was very nice and friendly - they didn’t have any problems with me taking pictures of the place and were informing us about their selections.

We should have taken notes on what is what …. we did not get any identification sheet or sth. similar and I couldn’t find anything online either, many were self-explanatory though, let’s get started:

The dark chocolate in the background was the Creme Brulee (?) one. It had a suttle caramel flavor to it (could have been more burned) and tasted very rich, buttery and a little sweet. Vanilla bean visible in there too and the dark chocolate on the outside was delicious. The milk chocolate enrobed chocolate was marzipan, orange flavored with a caramel layer inside. The marzipan was pretty dry and flavored with orange liquor (grand marnier?), the caramel layer was more caramel-ly than in the creme brulee one, too bad the marzipan was so dry though … That one was our favorite - by far - of this selection. Very intense Armagnac flavor with dried plums - what a combination! We will attempt to make a chocolate confection with these very ingredients later this year - I will get dried plums this week and put ‘em in some Armagnac jars …. The one big difference of ours will be, that we will not use a mold like Cluizel, but rather hand-cut this confection as well. It will be challenging to get this intense flavor in the ganache, because I can not make it too liquid. I am sure we’ll manage to perfect it though Who wants to be the taste-tester? A light lemon ganach, just flavored with lemon zest, reminded us on a lemon-pepper we made once. The ganache was slightly whipped maybe? A gentle chocolate, nice for the summer, although some people might like it more refreshing … A cork of a wine bottle - no wait, you can actually eat it I think it was supposed to be “Bordeaux” in there - we were kind of disappointed though. The ganache seemed dry and maybe a little old, the mold was quite irregularly filled and flavor wasn’t distinct. Pistachio marzipan is a little dry and the pstachio flvor is not very strong - but you can definetly tell what it is. Coffee Gianduja comes to mind - that’s pretty much all there is to say. Very strong and bold coffee flavor - very similar to our “Espresso, instead of hazelnut paste (like ours) it probably has Hazelnut Gianduja in it. Yummy (yeah, I like coffee) Too bad I don’t know the name of it anymore, but this was delicious as well! Milk chocolate on the outside (some hazelnut crunchies mixed in), then a layer of marzipan and a very soft ganache center with Rum. Fantastic combination of textures and flavors, classic but oh so good. On the image you see the last bite, it probably was 2-3 inches long. The ganache on the inside must have been chilled and then rolled into the marzipan - we actually did a “Bouche” like this at TasteDC in one of our workshops in Georgetown …. A good product for the colder month as well, I personally like it, because there is so much labor involved and it makes it so much more valueable and appreciated.

I love Cluizel’s chocolate and chocolate confections. Traditional and well balanced. I think it is hard to maintain such a high level of quality on the other side of the big pond though, without being there yourself. We have yet to see the store in Paris, which is owned by his daughter, but my parents were there and said it looked absolutely fabulous. Next time I am in Paris I’ll have to check it out ….

again: La Maison du Chocolat. These are the last items we have though

Interesting dessert chocolates we had tonight. The triangular one was coconut and had a very light and not too intense consistency. It was too bland for being butter and not too fatty/greasy on your tongue. It had to be coconut oil/fat ….. now, I have never worked with this, but it looks and tastes promising. I would try to intensify the flavor though, either with adding sugar (it wasn’t too sweet at all) or butter.

The second confection was delicious. A little firm maybe, containing raisins, walnuts/hazelnuts and orangeat …. tasted almost a little bit like christmas. And there was also some hazelnutty goodness in there, probably Mandel-Bitter-Nougat (like a dark almond gianduja).

Overall very satisfying - not too overwhelming considering the size. It gave me a good idea of envisioning dessert chocolates and what size they should be as well as how “filling” they should be.

Well, we didn’t just eat chocolate all day though …. tomorrow we will be at a tasting at Unwined in Alexandria, Virginia, where we introduce our Liberty Squares and Wine Pate de Fruit to the locals in Alexandria.

Melanie will be on her own tomorrow as I have an old friend of mine visit me here in Manassas. He is from a completely different metier, but masters that well and is quite successful.

We had some chocolate craving yesterday afternoon and decided to check out some of the chocolate confections we brought back from our NY trip earlier this week. The four pralines from La Maison du Chocolat look a little beaten up, but this is just because of the warm weather and not perfect transportation from NY to DC …. when we were entering the store on Madison Avenue in New York, all chocolates in the showcase looked absolutely flawless. I am not going over the top here - I inspected the pralines very closely and really - they almost look like molded pieces or made out of plastic. Here and there you could see an uneven edge, but the coating was very shiny and flawless. I think they get a special mix of couverture from Valrhona and I would love to know the cocoa butter content on that ….. uh well.

We took four pralines with us home and also two larger dessert chocolates. Those we haven’t tried yet, but they are a whopping 76g and 54g and that’s quite an impressive weight - I am very eager to try them out and compare them with our creations we did a few weeks ago for a local restaurant …

Figaro Noir

“Hazelnut and almond praline wrapped in dark chocolate” says the description. It has a very dark and almost bitter flavor to it - I loved it. Very smooth - it reminded me of a “Haselnuss Bitter Nougat” in Germany …. intense and long lasting flavor. Right now the only praline of ours similar in texture is the Pistachio Almond, bu it is much sweeter. Although many people like the sweetness in it, I love the bitter nutty tastes. I can see a similar praline in our future

Othello

“Ganache infused with honey” …. Delicious also. Very flowery, we get lavender from it - did they use lavender honey? A tiny bit grainy, probably a creamy honey though, that would explain the grainy-ness - would make it easier to make the ganache though. Also a little firm …. we have not made a dedicated honey praline yet, but it is a great idea and I can’t wait to try it out ……. if there is enough time this summer, but that’s somehow always the problem: time ….

Anastasia

“Gianduja praline” … again not as sweet as our gianduja, very buttery and it also has some tiny crunchies. The crunchies I like bigger myself, we put in some caramelized chopped almonds to give it some crunch. I did like the buttery mouthfeel though.

Bacchus

“Ganache with raisins flambeed in rum” ….. Yeah, that sounds good and it tastes delicious. This fall we will have a rum raisin praline - it will be a little different than this one though - more on that when the time is right

This praline tastes great though - the rum flavor reminded me of the rum raisins of my dad …. he always has this big tub of rum raisins in his cabinet above his working table in his pastry shop … in the mornings, when he makes fresh “Rum-Sahne-Torte” he whips up some cream and throws in some rum raisins - voila, there is your cream cake …. delicious!

We sat down in La Maison du Chocolat for a little bit to have a hot chocolate “Carraccas” whis was very intense, although not as rich as for example Burdick’s hot chocolate (which is done with cream milk) - I would guess LMDC uses water for the chocolate and serves it with a side of whipped cream. I like this approach much better for two reasons. 1) I grew up knowing hot chocolate being cocoa powder/milk powder/sugar made with water and whipped cream on top from my parents cafe - this is how it is served in Germany. 2) Although Burdick’s hot chocolate is delicious and rich, it is a little overwhelming and you got to have a good appetite to be able to finish a cup.

The staff was friendly, the store bright in brown tones - not as home-y as Michel Cluizel, but still nice. I would definetly recommend visiting La Maison du Chocolat, even just to take a look at the confections.

Although we had little time to spend on our own in Firenze last week, we couldn’t pass the opportunity to check out the local chocolate scene a little bit - especially since the ‘chocolate valley’ was nearby (around Pistoia). We checked out a little cafe that offered homemade chocolates, although they do also purchase some confections from local chocolatiers. The name is Hemingway and their cafe is dark, but still hip and trendy. We have only sampled a few of their chocolate and have a lot more to go. Here are some pictures i took in the hotel room, the chocolates got a little scratched, but it gives you a good idea on what they look like …

This one has a very hot taste that gets you in the end, although we did not get any description with them, this one must be a chili/pink peppercorn …

a flavor that is hard to distinguish,  although it tastes very good. It must be some kind of liquor, a sweet but not too fruity direction.

Hazelnut milk chocolate. We were a little disappointed, it almost tastes like just milk chocolate in a cup with a roasted hazelnut in the center.

Cinnamon … tastes very much like more christmas-y spices too … like clove, vanilla - fantastic flavors, smooth center, great chocolate … although I would not consider it a flavor for the warmer seasons.

Jasmine Tea …. I love Jasmine Tea and in long-term we will probably have a year-round flavor of this one too. I might enrobe it with a milk chocolate though. This one was very sweet and had a very strong flavor to it - the latter i like, the sweetness I would try to reduce.

Earl Grey Tea. Much sweeter than ours and no bitterness at all. They must not bring the cream to a boil with the leaves, but take them ou beforehand. Although this is an interesting technique, I kind of like the bitter taste that you get with Tea - just like when you make yourself a cup of it.

This must have been a wine that they used with it. It almost tastes mint-y and it would have been great to have had the actual wine with it.

Tomorrow we taste more chocolates from a different store - the oldest pastry shop in Firenze - I have not made any pictures of those confections yet either though - nighty night!