Things To Do In St Ives – I Should Coco Chocolate Workshop
Fun facts about where chocolate comes from
When you’re on holiday to Cornwall, there are many things to do in St Ives for all the family. One of which is chocolate making with I Should Coco on Tregenna Terrace. I chose to try the chocolate making to share my experience with you all.
My workshop started at 2.30 pm where I was welcomed by Andrea and Sally who work at I Should Coco. I was shown to the rear of the shop on Tregenna Terrace where I saw kitchen cupboards and countertops as well as my fellow workshop mates. Each of us was given an apron and chocolatier’s hat. I felt the part as soon as the hat was on!
Workshops last between an hour and a half to two and half hours depending on if you’ve chosen a mixed aged group or an adults-only workshop. I had opted for an adults-only as I wanted to immerse myself in chocolate for as long as possible.
On each of our trays, we also had a dark, milk and white chocolate button. Much the same as wine tasting, we were encouraged to allow each one in turn, to melt in our mouths to swill the flavours around. The only hardship there was we needed to wait 5 minutes between each one in order to distinguish between the flavours.
While we did that, we learnt a few interesting facts about where chocolate actually comes from.
Andrea from I Should Coco
Cocoa Pods
Cocoa pods grow off Cocoa tree trunks. Not off a branch or underground, they actually form straight off the trunk of a tree. The trees are of the Theobroma cacao species.
Cocoa trees grow in a narrow belt 20 degrees either side of the equator (think North and Central South America or Central Africa terrain). You guessed it, it’s often referred to as the Chocolate Belt.
When the cocoa pods are harvested, they are brightly coloured hard husks twice the size of a small human hand. Inside the cocoa pods are cocoa beans which are actually very similar in look and taste to lychees!
A cocoa pod
Cocoa Nibs
The Cocoa pods are harvested and carefully cut open with machetes where the cocoa beans and the pulp are removed.
The next stage is these are left to ferment in boxes or covered in banana leaves, The fermentation process gives the flavour to the cocoa beans and it can take up to a week. The fermentation process breaks down the pulp of the cocoa bean. This triggers a series of biochemical and physical processes which all influence the chocolate’s flavours and aromas.
The beans are then dried for another couple of weeks with continuous turning to reduce the moisture content to about 7%. Once all that has happened, they can be roasted to around 200 degrees to develop the flavour.
Once roasted, the husk is removed and that’s when you’re left with cocoa nibs.
Cocoa Powder
We’re still a way off what we fondly know as chocolate at this stage.
The next stage is to ground down the nibs under heavy steel rollers making a thick paste which is about 50% cocoa butter. This is where we are getting much, much closer to that familiar flavour of white chocolate.
Cocoa butter can then also be pressed out which leaves us with cocoa powder.
Making the ganache centre for our truffles
Fellow workshop mates and I had all opted to make milk chocolate truffles. As you get on any Saturday morning kitchen programme, we got a flavour on how to make ganache but for expediency, we were given “one made earlier” to start refining to make our own truffles.
We all got a little involved in the very simple process of making dark chocolate ganache just so we could appreciate what went into making our ready-made milk chocolate ganache made before our arrival.
Ingredients
8 fl oz of dark chocolate buttons
8 fl oz of double cream
That’s it!
Bring the double cream to boil and pour over the chocolate buttons then gently fold the mixture until it’s all melted. Chocolatiers don’t whisk or pummel their mixture at this stage so gently does it!
We were warned that it’s very easy to split a ganache as it’s where the cocoa butter oil splits and comes to the top.
If you want to add a boozy flavour to your dark chocolate ganache, now is the time to add a snifter of brandy or tequila or get spicy with chilli oil.
Leave the bowl for 4 hours at room temperature.
At this important stage, we were also told when using 8 fl oz of milk chocolate buttons to make milk chocolate ganache, if you want to add some alcohol or other liquid flavouring such as raspberry juice, you have to calculate it off the 8 fl oz of cream. For example, if I were making a raspberry milk chocolate ganache, I will use 8 fl oz of milk chocolate buttons, 2 fl oz of raspberry juice and 6 fl oz of double cream. Whereas with dark chocolate, you simply add it to the mixture as you fancy.
Pouring hot cream over chocolate buttons
Truffles
Our bowls of milk chocolate ganache were given to us and the next stage was to make it light and fluffy using an electric whisker. Depending on how dense you wanted the truffle to be or melt on your tongue light, you either spent longer or shorter amount of time whisking.
Milk Chocolate ganache ready for whisking
Who remembers asking a parent to lick the whisk during cake making when little? I did and I wasn’t afraid to ask Andrea before she literally whisked away the whisks to be washed! The mixture was just divine and I knew then my truffles were going to be amazing.
I wanted my truffles to be super light and fluffy so I whisked for about 1 minute until the mixture was almost mousse like. Using a contraption that looked like a mini-ice-cream scoop, we then painstakingly scooped, scraped off the top and then carefully released truffle after truffle on our trays.
Once the bowl was scraped of the last ganache mixture, I had 22 truffles. Our trays were put in the fridge for the truffles to set.
Ganache truffles
Decorated chocolate bars
While our truffles set, we moved onto our next creation; a large chocolate bar in the shape of a large square. The mould for the squares are I Should Coco’s own and our first task was to polish them up with a cotton pad. The reason for the polishing was so when our chocolate was ready to poured and then set, the finished product would be lovely and shiny.
We had to be careful to hold the moulds on the outer edges so as not to get grubby finger prints that would ruin the finished product.
The next stage was where we could get creative and personalise our chocolate bars. We were each given two pieces of round tracing paper, two square pieces of paper the same size as our mould and a pen. What we would draw on the paper would then be traced using melted dark chocolate and the design then filled with white chocolate.
My creativity stretched to a robin that actually looked more like a fat seagull and a heart with a shining star. The melted dark and white chocolate came in a polystyrene box in small handmade piping pouches. The trick was to make sure the piping pouches went back in the box if you were using them so as to keep the liquid runny. With a steady hand, I traced my drawings in dark chocolate and then filled them in with the white chocolate.
Dark chocolate traced drawings
Once we’d finished, our shapes were whipped down to the fridge to set. These would be the adornments to our chocolate bars so I was looking forward (at that stage) to how they would look as a finished product.
Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory
Our chocolate shapes were in the fridge along with our truffles, and our plastic mould trays were super shiny and buffed.
Andrea then led us down into what I can only describe as chocolate heaven. Three machines churned melted chocolate to keep it smooth and optimum pouring temperature. The dark chocolate machine even had a tap of constantly running dark chocolate. It took every ounce of willpower not to bend my head and open my mouth under the tap!
We followed a demonstration by Andrea on how to fill the moulds with our chosen chocolate, how to scrape excess off the top and then how to remove any air bubbles. Then it was our turn to have a go. I went first and chose the milk chocolate machine where warm, runny milk chocolate looked like velvet delight. Using a ladle, I poured the chocolate into the mould and then using a tool which may have looked at home in a plasterers tool bag, I scraped off excess chocolate to leave smooth and filled section of the mould.
A machine that shuddered once turned on was used to settle out the chocolate in the mould removing any bubbles.
Pouring milk chocolate into mould
Final touches to the chocolate bar
With a smooth milk chocolate blank canvass in my chocolate bar mould, I collected my chilled creative adornments a placed them carefully. We had a selection of other pretty edible bits to complete our works of art. I repeated the whole process with dark chocolate and placed my individual and unique to me chocolate bars in the fridge to cool and set.
Unique chocolate bar design
Finishing touches to the truffles
The final steps to our truffles was going to get messy, so were each given latex gloves in readiness for mess.
The final steps for our chilled ganache truffle fillings was to coat them in chocolate. Each of us were given a bowl of warm and runny milk chocolate and were shown what to do. The steps were:
1. Dip 3 fingers into the warm chocolate with your dominant hand and place in the palm of our other hand
2. Take the chilled ganache truffle and roll it evenly in the palm of chocolate
3. Dip your fingers again if more chocolate needed
We had to be careful not to do too much at this stage as it would dry with run marks or would have too much of a chocolatey base. Andrea told us that once we’d finished the first coat, we would then start over with the second coat as it would have dried by then. So, I entered a stage of mindfulness once again as I coated my 22 truffles lovingly, twice over.
Coating truffles in milk chocolate
Gold dusted truffles
The very final step was to make our truffles super special.
We could either marble them in white chocolate using the same technique as above but with melted white chocolate, or we could have a pot of shimmery gold powder and paint our truffles.
I chose to add some bling to my truffles for effect and was given a white glove, a pot of gold power and a small paint brush. It was then a very simple process of dabbing the brush in the powder, tapping it a little to remove too much excess powder and then paint the truffle. What I was left with were 22 amazing looking truffles that you would see on a tray through a posh chocolatier’s shop window! I felt very proud indeed.
To finish off with a flourish, Andrea gave us a selection of boxes to present our truffles in and clear bags to showcase our chocolate bars. All bar 4 of the truffles are gifts and the chocolate bars will also be gifted to dear friends of mine.
My finished chocolates I got to take home
A successful workshop
I loved my two and half hours at I Should CoCo’s chocolate making workshop and found it such great value for money. I now understand why handmade chocolates are more expensive than your bog-standard mass-produced bars and boxes of chocolate. So much more thought, love and effort go into making each single chocolate! I not only learned where cocoa pods are grown, what happens to the cocoa beans and how cocoa powder is produced but got stuck in making my own chocolates walking away with a generous amount of chocolatey Christmas gifts for dear friends.
Island Retreat | sleeps 6