Les Petits Chefs baking club welcomed a return guest chef into club last week – Kerry Beal aka The Chocolate Doctor!
Kerry’s visited the school a few times before, the last time being in 2019, so it was lovely to welcome her back to our little club!
Kerry is the inventor of the EZ Temper machine, which tempers chocolate effortlessly (read about it here) and spent a bit of time chatting to the students about the importance of temperature when working with chocolate. Here’s Kerry showing the students how to bring the chocolate up to temperature using a hand-held hairdryer!
Here she is adding the tempered cocoa butter to the chocolate…
And then it was perfect to work with! First up – everyone’s favourites – chocolate frogs!
We also practiced piping the tempered chocolate into flower moulds…
The we worked with chocolate-dipped Oreos to perfect our piping skills even more!
I loved this one for a dad’s 50th birthday!
The kids got so creative!
And then we let the chocolate set at our “window fridge”
Thankfully, it was a chilly day!
Finally, we worked with lots of melted chocolate to make bark!
Caramel apple bark!
And PopRocks bark! So fun to eat!
Finally, the “leftovers”!
These also set at the window fridge then we divided them up!
We had such a blast – thank you Kerry for taking time out of your week to come and work with us! When I asked the kids to thank her with a personal thank you (i.e. “Thanks for… teaching me how to …” “I really enjoyed …” or “I learned …”) I was impressed with how much they retained even in a short session! Chocolate is a great incentive!
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Holy smokes – what a phenomenal session! I hope the boys (and parents) appreciated how lucky they were. Well, that is, if any of those treats made it home to the parents, LOL. 😉
I especially like the “big frogs” moulds. 🙂
We are SO lucky at school to have amazing people like Kerry working with the students!