Planning a Christmas Assortment Box

I've always made sweet treats to give to friends and family at Christmastime. It could be a s'mores chocolate bark with Teddy Grahams and mini marshmallows or Skor fudge, or some other confection. But after completing my professional chocolatier program in 2018, I began using Christmas as an opportunity to test new recipes and keep up my chocolate skills. First I would pick a few recipes to bring home to my parents, but this slowly transitioned into creating a small assortment for them. And since the smallest batch of chocolates I make tends to result in 20-25 pieces, I found myself filling about 20-24 boxes, reserving 6-7 to take home, and sharing what remained with friends and coworkers. Once I realized this was going to be "a thing," I ordered four-piece ballotin boxes and some personalized stickers to seal them. 

Last year's four-piece box included a cointreau dark chocolate truffle, a spiced molasses honeycomb toffee dipped in dark chocolate, a milk chocolate salted caramel, and a white chocolate fruit and nut cup with pistachios and dried cranberries. The assortment for 2021 featured a dark chocolate salted caramel, a milk chocolate orange truffle, a marzipan centre enrobed in dark chocolate, and a wintergreen meltaway. And the year before that, the boxes were filled with a sour cherry truffle, a fruit and nut cup with peanuts and raisins, a mint meltaway, and a dark chocolate salted caramel. 

You may see a pattern emerging here. There's always a truffle, because they are delicious and because I've been experimenting with efficient ways of forming, rolling, and enrobing. Sometimes I scoop and sometimes I pipe, but when it comes to enrobing them I've landed on hand rolling as my preferred method. Salted caramels are very popular and standard in most assortments, and they enable me to practice my skills using dipping forks. The remaining two pieces are more variable, but are usually designed to present variety in texture and/or type of chocolate (since my default tends to be dark chocolate). Importantly, across the four pieces, there are some with longer keeping limits, which allows me to produce some of the pieces throughout November, instead of having to produce everything over a day or two in December prior to packing. Some are less labour-intensive (like nut cups and meltaways) and some are more labour-intensive (like truffles and caramels). 

And so as I begin to plan for the 2023 assortment, I'm thinking about ideas for new flavours that have emerged from my chocolate study, as well as considerations of variety in chocolate, technique, shape, and finish, and practical concerns like keeping limits. I've been keeping notes throughout the year, which has led to more than four options, so decisions will have to be made -- like whether to maintain the traditional salted caramel or switch things up this year. And that decision will need to be made very soon, because production starts next week!

What is your favourite piece in a chocolate assortment?