Welcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon and today I need to make a crowd-pleaser
dessert and what I mean by that is ... we have people coming for dinner
tomorrow that we haven't eaten with before ... so I don't know if they like
sweet stuff like chocolate and candy or savory things like cheese and crackers
or maybe even healthy desserts like fruit I like fruit 🍎 So I'm just going to
get a few things and chuck 🇳🇿 them in my trolley and take them home and see what
we can make that will please everyone. Okay to start with I'm going to break up
all of that chocolate and dip it into a big bowl and then temper it. Mix some of
that in a smaller bowl with some tempered white chocolate so that you end
up with two slightly different toned colors of chocolate and then also
temper some dark chocolate and drizzle it across some baking paper.
Now the baking paper here needs to be completely flat in the bottom of a
baking tray and it needs to have some decent height to the sides of the tray
because what I'm wanting to do here is make like a chopping board or a wooden
board out of chocolate. Then drizzle the middle toned chocolate and some white
chocolate over the top making sure you're always going lengthwise across
the pan letting it drizzle over the edges of the pan as well. Just always in
the one direction like the grain of wood and as I said before make sure your
chocolate is tempered otherwise it's not going to stay set at room temperature. If
you don't know what I mean by tempered watch my chocolate secrets video I'll
link to the chocolate playlist at the end it explains how to do that there.
Then pour in about two-thirds of the rest of the tempered milk chocolate over
the top and carefully spread it out again trying to only move in a
lengthwise direction across the length of the pan not in swirls or they're in
the other direction. Use your spatula to spread the chocolate all the way to the
edges and up the sides of each edge. I'm gonna make one end dried fruits and nuts
and freeze dried strawberries and a little bit of ginger just to keep all
the adults happy. Load lots of that in there that looks
great and then the other end I'm filling with candy and Oreos caramels honeycomb ...
this should get the kids excited 🤪 Now we want to hide all of that by pouring over
the rest of the tempered chocolate and spread it out to cover everything.
Those freeze-dried strawberries keep floating to the top, just try and push them
down a bit and then put that in the fridge. Once it's set take a knife and
scrape along the chocolate at the level at the top of your tin so that the
bottom is completely flat. You don't want any bumps from Oreos or those freeze-dried
strawberries that kept floating. Hang on to these scrapings just put them in a
jar in the fridge because they're great on top of ice cream. Now we can't leave
this open like this because if you leave the freeze-dried strawberries exposed to
the air they'll go soft instead of crunchy which is not what we want, so
just pour on a little bit more tempered chocolate and spread that out back and
forth all the way over your chocolate and then use a spatula to flatten it and
make it all nice and level with the top of the tin and then again we're just
going to leave that to set in the fridge. Once it is set let's flip that upside
down give it a bit of a push ... it's not coming out ... it's stuck mmm it has to come
out or it's not going to work for my dessert! Let's flip it over again and
jiggle it and I'm hoping that the weight of the chocolate here is going to help
it come out of the tin. Yay! It came out and it didn't break which is what I was
worried about. Peel back that paper and don't worry this is not what it's going
to look like when it's finished it's just a starting point. Use a metal
spatula or you could use a knife just to scrape back the chocolate to give it a
bit more of a wood look rather than drizzled chocolate lines. Once you've
scraped even amount of the whole thing spread a really thin coating of dark
chocolate over the top ... this is a bit like adding a stain to your wood
it needs to be thin enough that you can still see some of the woodgrain
underneath it but it just softens the effect. That's starting to look a bit
more like wood now but we need to add some texture, so just take your knife and
run it down the chocolate trying to pay attention to where the variations in
your color is. So if there's a darker patch try and follow that line that
you're doing with your knife along the edge of your darker patch for your wood
grain. Now take a spatula again and just gently
run it across the surface you're not wanting to take much off this time
you're just highlighting that wood grain that you drew with the knife. See how
that just really brings it up and now scraped chocolate looks quite rough
and quite matte it doesn't look very shiny like a polished board would ... so the
trick to fix that is to put some paper towel in iced water and then gently rub
it over the surface of your chocolate. While that's drying wash your fresh
fruit ... figs always look good on a platter I don't really like the taste of them
though do you? And then unwrap your cheeses I did
consider making fake cheese's out of chocolate and I was going to do that but
then I thought if you're a savoury lover and you really like cheese and I brought
it to the table you'd be really disappointed that it was all chocolate 😕
No cheese! So I'm gonna keep the board sweet and there is a lot of
chocolate in that and keep the cheese savoury. For wedges of cheese try and
choose ones which have their names on the wax so people know what they're
eating and now it's time to put it all together. Put the Jarlsberg wedge there
then the weird tasting but cool-looking figs can go next to it there then a good
chunk of cheddar ... that black wax looks great. Next we've got a wedge of Gouda
that can go there and every good cheese platter has to have a soft cheese so
I'll put a circle of camembert there that will be perfect for that and for
some variety a wedge of this Wensleydale with cranberries that can go in the
corner. Then a bit of fresh fruit a little bit more. Do you think they'll
notice the board at first or will they just be looking at the cheese? I wonder
how long it'll take them to figure it out? We're definitely gonna need some
crackers just place them on the side ... that one's stuck together split that up
and a few little nuts. And the cheese bladder is ready to be served and an
update for you everyone was happy eating this, relaxed and enjoying the dessert
from the youngest guest he was so cute and he was only 3 years old right
through to the teenagers and the adults. Everyone had something on it that they
loved which for me was the fruit in the chocolate for others it was the cheese
in the crackers and most people just liked every single thing that was in it ...
except for the figs of course ... I told you they were weird 😳 One very popular
addition to the chocolate was the ginger in the fruit and nut end, so make sure
you add some of that if you're making this. Click here to see more chocolate
creations, here for the latest video and here to subscribe. Make it a great week
by being thankful for what you have and I'll see you on Friday 💕
you