Wedding Favour Chocolates: A Beginning

One of my closest friends and favourite people in the world is getting married this year and as well as being a bridesmaid (and wedding cake conspirator), I have been asked to make chocolates for the wedding favours. I love experimenting and generally playing around with chocolate, so with a fairly large task ahead of me, I thought I'd blog my progress through the process.

At the moment, We're at the end of stage one and the sweets in question have been decided upon. The next step will be to do a trial run, which I will be doing at the end of June so that I can experiment with new techniques to me and check that everything works well.

So for now all I can do is list what I have planned, and as and when I get to trying things out, I will post more details.

The wedding favours will be in a small box and will consist of four different sweets, which are as follows

• Fruit-Flavoured Fudge - For this I will be using an existing fudge recipe I have for strawberry fudge, and will experiment with replacing the colouring and flavouring with freeze-dried fruit powders in the hope that will naturally flavour and colour. I will be trying this in three flavours: Strawberry, Raspberry, and Cherry. If the powders don't work, then I'll be using food flavourings as per the original recipe.
• Champagne Truffle Squares - This is a recipe that I found in a supermarket magazine, and have never tried before. My main experimentation with this will be the decoration, which will be using gold food spray and a stencil to create a heart motif on the top.
• Violet Creams - With this chocolate I will be using a dark chocolate shell, decorated with a pink chocolate heart design on top, filled with a violet flavoured fondant cream. This is probably my most tried and tested recipe, that should be easy enough for me to do.
• Rainbow Ganache Truffles - By far my most ambitious chocolate.for this I will be using a dark chocolate ganache coated in a white chocolate shell which will be decorated with a circular rainbow design. For this, I will be experimenting with colouring the white chocolate with powdered food colouring, which I've never used before. If the colour works, then the actual execution should be relatively simple enough, but time consuming.

Also for the last two chocolates on the above list, I will be attempting to use a piping bag pen to make it easier to create the designs needed. Hopefully, this should be faster than using paint brushes as I have done before. No matter the turnout though, I can't wait to get playing - though I fear that if the colouring works well, could lead to more creative chocolate decoration ideas in future.