Chocolate Lover – Make Your Own Chocolate Give-Aways

My high school teacher shared this trade secret to a couple of us, I’ve shared this to my mom after that and since then, we’ve been frequenting this haven and source of sweet solid happiness.  We give one of our happiness a name, “chocolate”, and our chocolate temple, “The Chocolate Lover”.

Here's me, at Chocolate Lover in 2008 - used the photo for a "FRIENDSTER" Christmas testimonial greeting! ^_^ I completely abandoned that account and transferred to facebook. Message translates in English as: "Promise! I was buying a gift for you but I think I might have been panic-buying... That's why I'm WANTED! So this is going to be my gift for you again this year (the friendster testimonial)... I'll make-it up to you next year!"

About the Shop

Part of the attraction to the shop is how the structure looks.  ^_^  See for yourself!

What We Bought

We’ve been there lots of times in the past and we get all our chocolate goodies there (molds, peanuts, cookies – you can add to your molten and molded chocolates) so we really know what to buy and how much of each item.  Our goal that day was to make our own version of the chocolate “Crunch”, so we got some Rice Crispies, Regular Milk Chocolate, and a couple of heart chocolate molds.

Regular Milk Chocolate (1Kg) P158

Rice Crispies (500g) P46

Chocolate Molds P86each (standard price but there were discounted ones too)

CORRECT WAY OF MELTING YOUR CHOCOLATE LOVER CHOCOLATE

Follow these steps carefully or your chocolates won’t melt at all… Even if you turn the heat up!  The key to these steps is that their chocolates SHOULD NEVER BE MELTED IN DIRECT HEAT.  So we’ll be using steam in this set-up.

1)  Select a small-regular sized pot and put a small amount of water (I’d say an inch or even less than an inch high).

2)  On a glass heat resistant bowl (pyrex recommended), place it on top of the pot that has the water.  Make sure that the bowl doesn’t touch the water inside the pot.  If it does, reduce the amount of water in the pot, or get a deeper pot.

The set-up should look like this. Source: http://www.wheat-free.org/

3)  Slice or cut your chocolate bars in small pieces.  What I do is cut them into quarter of an inch thick rectangular chunks so that they melt faster.

4)  Put your stove into low fire, and put the chocolate chunks into the bowl.Once the chocolate melts, that’s the time you can mix in however much amount of crispies, nuts, cookies or even raisin (if you want) into the bowl, or you can have it plain.  You can use a silicon spatula to mix the chocolate.

5)  With a spoon, you can scoop out some of the molten chocolate into the molds.  Most of the time I just spread them out into a wax paper lined pan and create really cool chocolate barks (pictures next time… ^_^).

***  Sometimes, if you feel that the water is hot enough and there’s still enough steam and heat inside the pot to melt the chocolates you still have, you can turn the stove off and turn it on again if you need more heat/steam.

Here's what we did with ours. These have been in our fridge for 4 days now (yeah we made too many - we should probably share some, right? ^_^;) These are a little moist in the outside from the difference of temperature inside the fridge and when I got them out. You can store them outside the fridge too (they won't melt unless you steam them again), but beware of ants. ^_^

CONTACT INFORMATION:

45 P. Tuazon Blvd. cornerC. Beniztez St. CubaoQuezon, 1109 Philippines
(632) 411-7474 / (632) 724-5752 / (632) 724-4964
info@echocolatelover.com

website:  http://echocolatelover.com/

How I prefer to go to Chocolate Lover:

I prefer commuting to the place to avoid the EDSA traffic and wasting gasoline sitting in, again, heavy traffic (but Mario prefers taking the car).  If you commute, take the MRT and get off at Cubao station.  Go down at the south bound lane of EDSA (not the side where gateway or Farmer’s plaza is).  Take an orange tricycle and say “Chocolate Lover” and they’ll know where that is and take you there.  Same way going home, ride an orange tricycle back to the MRT (and they conveniently have a terminal right in front of Chocolate Lover).

MAP:

Have you been to this castle of chocolates?  Do you have any choco combination tips you want to share?