Chocolate Rose Leaves

I wanted to talk a little about the chocolate rose leaves (sample above) Tom and I made, and which ended up being part of the final dessert for the luncheon on Sunday. It was an ambitious project on my part, having never made chocolate rose leaves before, I charged into the project at full speed ahead thinking "How hard could it be?"

Let's put it this way, remember my romantic fantasy of moving to a medieval town in France and opening a Chocolatier? The one where I fancied myself making artisan breads, pastries and chocolates all day while I wore cute little outfits and never had a bad hair day? Well...it's going to take a little more practice before I can do that...

I really wanted the dessert for Sundays luncheon to be something special and since I had the time on Saturday I figured it would be fun to see how far I could go with trying my hand at making artistic decorations for it. I have a really great book called "Best Ever Cake Decorating A complete guide to cake decorating techniques with over 100 cakes, from traditional to classics to the latest in contemporary designs by Angela Nilsen & Sarah Maxwell. It was a book I picked up second hand from a book sale a few years back, brought home and basically forgot about. On Saturday I flipped through the book for a while and decided of all the projects in it, I could probably make the Chocolate Leaves. It looked fairly straight forward and simple enough, so I marched myself off to the Korean deli and purchased some really pretty roses for my little project.

Back home again, I selected some of the nicer looking leaves and after washing them and patting them I lay them out on paper towels to air dry while I melted some chocolate. I decided to use white chocolate because I thought a combination of white leaves, and then green leaves (white chocolate colored with green food dye) would look pretty. Once the chocolate was melted I stuck my face in the bowl and ate using a pastry brush I brushed a layer of chocolate on the underside of some leaves just like the book instructed me to do. HA! Easier said than done, the warm chocolate combined with the somewhat flimsy leaves and the nylon pastry brush made it a task more difficult than I imagined it would be. My first attempts resulted in thin uneven layers of chocolate that would NO WAY easily peel off the leaf once it set. Right about then, Tom walked into the kitchen, he had been wondering what I was doing because I had been so quiet. Well, it was his lucky moment because...he was instantly recruited to help.

Tom has spent the last three years restoring a car from the ground up. He has a little more patience than I do when it comes to things like this that require a steady and even hand. That's not to say that I'm not a patient person, it's just that sometimes my enthusiasm for a project is so great, that it becomes hard for me to concentrate OR have the delicate touch that is sometimes needed for tasks like this. Handing Tom the pastry brush, I left him to try his hand at spreading a better layer of chocolate, while I while I went off to dye the rest of the chocolate green. The white alone was too plain looking and didn't really show the detail of the leaves very well. The green worked out quite nicely.

Tom managed to do a better job of spreading the chocolate a little thicker but we were finding it extremely difficult to peel it off the leaves once the chocolate had set. To speed the process along we were freezing the leaves then peeling, which worked well, but wasn't really a perfect solution. Once the frozen chocolate touched our warm fingers it started to melt immediately and once again became very difficult to handle without making a big mess. Tom thought that maybe the white chocolate was the culprit...that the higher fat content was responsible for making it melt so quickly... or something to that effect. As an experiment he melted a bar of regular chocolate and used that to make some leaves. The regular chocolate DID spread on more easily and looked less streaky but in the end it too proved difficult to handle. We managed to make enough usable leaves for the dessert, which I will write about and post on Monday night. I promise. I just need a little time to write it and sort out the pictures.

I'm not done with making chocolate leaves though. I feel like there has to be a way to make them more easy to work with. Perhaps it needs something added to the mixture, like butter or maybe corn syrup? I'm not sure just what... but since it looks so great as a dessert garnish, to me it's worth the trouble of finding out.

Written by Deb on March 17, 2003 01:04 AM