The time has come to unveil this year's four-piece assortment!
Toffee Cup - Toffee pieces mixed into milk chocolate. It replaces the traditional nut cup.
Polar Bear Paw - Macademia nut "turtle" enrobed in white chocolate. It replaces the traditional salted caramel.
Wild Blueberry Truffle - A silky dark chocolate truffle made with Newfoundland blueberries.
Sunbutter Swirl - Sunflower seed gianduja in a dark chocolate shell.
Each recipe made between 42 and 53 pieces, so I packaged 42 boxes of chocolates and have a few left over to enjoy over the holidays.
I'm not going to lie, this year's production run was a bit of a challenge. It was glorious to make chocolate in my new kitchen, which has much more space. As a result, it's very easy to set up stations and move through the process seamlessly instead of moving between a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room. But it took longer than I care to admit for me to adjust to the power of my new microwave, which I use to melt chocolate when working in small batches.
And two pieces didn't quite turn out as I'd imagined. I think the polar bear paw flavour is dead on. The toasted macademia nuts are absolutely delicious and a great variation on the "turtle" chocolate theme. My caramel, however, is just a shade firmer than I'd like. It's still good -- just not gooey. On the truffle front, it was a challenge to get a robust blueberry flavour, I suspect because the dark chocolate overpowered it. In the future, I would either use white chocolate for the ganache with a dark chocolate shell or I would pulverize freeze dried blueberries and roll the truffle in them to bolster the flavour. This sort of thing is bound to happen when developing recipes, so I'll make notes in my master recipe binder and try them again sometime.
All of this is a matter of personal preference, of course. I've had several people tell me the polar bear paw was their favourite, while others appreciated that the truffle wasn't more fruit-forward. Chacun à son gout!
I had hoped for an update to my packaging this year, but that didn't quite work out as planned (a story for another blog). That will be a project for 2026.
For now, I have a few more boxes of chocolate to deliver.
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