Sabrina Razak: Chocolate and My Tiny Little Secret

Assalamualaikum & Hye guys!!

How are you guys? Hopefully everybody are in a good health.

So… many things had happened to me throughout my ‘hidden year’ and maybe I will share it in another post. What I want to share? So many things! Just, stay tune!

Long Story Short, today I will share a bit and bite about everybody most favourite sweets, the symbol of love and sometime can be the cure to the broken heart. C-H-O-C-O-L-A-T-E

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2/5) Movie CLIP - Chocolate ...

YESS… the delicious sweet, milky, and a bit bitter mixture that can make us drown in cloud of happiness

cacao | Description, Cultivation, Pests, & Diseases | Britannica

Photo from, Encyclopedia Britannica

This gift from god is actually a fruit from a tree named, Theobroma cocoa. The scientific name is from the Greek and it means “food of the gods.” I believe, all chocolate lover agree with the name.

Photo from, Song Tang (Santos)

But where is this tree come from? Cocoa cultivation is restricted to the hot, humid belt 10 to 20 degrees north and south of the equator such as Ghana, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Indonesia and Brazil. Believe it or not, our country Malaysia also can grow the tree.

There are many types of chocolate in this world, from solid to liquid and from sweet to bitter. Let’s see what is on the top menu?

Unsweetened Chocolate (also known as baking chocolate), it contains 100% cocoa and 0% sugar. It’s held together by cocoa butter. Most people find unsweetened chocolate too bitter to eat as is, but it is often used in baking.

Dark Chocolate is chocolate that contains over 70% cocoa. Not all 70% chocolates will have the same flavours or bitterness since the provenance of the cocoa bean can radically alter the flavour, but all will contain the same amount of cocoa to sugar ratio.

Bittersweet Chocolate or famous known as dark chocolate in Europe, is a chocolate that contains around 70% cocoa and 30% sugar. Nowadays this chocolate is more often used in baking than the traditional unsweetened chocolate.

Semi-sweet Chocolate contains around 60% cocoa and 40% sugar. This great all-purpose chocolate can be eaten, used in baking, or even melted for decorating pastries.

Milk chocolate is chocolate that contains only 10 – 40% cocoa mixed with sugar and milk solids. Occasionally vanilla is added extra flavour and lecithin for smoothness.

White chocolate contains no cocoa at all and is simply made up of cocoa butter and sugar and occasionally a little vanilla for flavour. Chocolate purists don’t consider white chocolate to even be chocolate.

Photo from, taste of home

Chocolate bars are nice and versatile. They melt well and if broken up into chunks work beautifully as chocolate chips. In fact, in countries where it might be hard to find chocolate chips, most bakers simply use chopped chocolate bars.

Gif from, gfycat

Just for off record, I will use chocolate bar to make cookies when sometimes there are no chocolate chip in the house. I will cut it in small chunks or sometime in medium. The outcome is speechless. The cookies are crunchy at the outside and the melted chocolate inside it will melt your heart together with the bite you take. Don’t trust me? Try it, you will never regret.

Gif form, tumblr

Chocolate chips are often treated with stabilizers to help them retain their shape when baking, meaning they aren’t ideal for melting. Higher quality chocolate chips like those made by Guittard or Ghirardelli contain fewer stabilizers and can be used if a recipe calls for melted chocolate. Some biscuits with chocolate chip are taste much more delightful.

Gif from, max brenner

Chocolate wafers look like large thin chocolate coin and are specially formulated for easy melting. These are ideal for covering fruit or anything else. They’re also a great base if you’ve decided to try your hand at making your own chocolate truffles. Nowadays it can come in so many colors.

This is kind of my little secret. So I had attended a pastry class, sometime if there are some extra melted chocolate from the chocolate wafers to make the ganache, I will bring it home. The taste is like Nutella but minus the hazelnut. Oh my, I can eat it with ‘tiger’ biscuits or just cream crackers for the whole night. I can be the happiest person after a few seconds in moody mode. I can turn myself into the good kitty after the catnip. You should acknowledge the rich chocolate flavour in it will melt your entire night.

Have you decided yet? Maybe you can eat it with some fruits, dried fruits, biscuits, pastries or you can name it and try it. Sometime it is worth to try something different, right? Personally, I love to eat bread with some chocolate with banana. The taste of banana combine with the sweet milky chocolate and the soft texture of bread. Chewy, creamy and sweet…umphhh

While you enjoying your Cadbury or kitkat, did you ever wonder how the bitter cocoa seed can transform in to the delicious luxurious chocolate? Here how it happen…

Once upon a time, nahhh just kidding

Step 1; Pluck some cocoa fruit from the tree and then separate the beans out of the pulp.

Step 2; Laid the beans for fermentation. The cocoa beans have an intense bitter taste, thus fermented the beans help to develop flavour.

Step 3; Then beans are evaporate the water.

Step 4; Roast the beans at 120 – 150 degree Celsius. Roasting can reduces the chocolate’s acidity.

Step 5; Separate the beans form the shell. This step called winnowing is use to remove the shell, in

order to get the cocoa nibs.

Step 6; Grind the cocoa nibs to until they release the cocoa butter and form a cocoa mass or chocolate liquor. The cocoa nibs contain about 50% cocoa butter and 50% cocoa solids.

Step 7; The refined cocoa mass with added sugar (and milk powder for milk chocolate) is conched. In conching, the liquid chocolate is stirred at elevated temperatures typically between 50 and 80°C and can take time to 72 hours. This to create a smoother mixture of chocolate.

Step 8; The mixture need to be tempering to reduce the heat and ready to be shape.

Step 9; Shaping the mixture to become solid is by pour it into a mould. Let it become solid and then it can be eaten.

That are the basic process of making chocolate form a fruit into the luscious chocolate bar. Do you want to do it yourself? Me? I will rather buy at the store, I’ am afraid I will turn the chocolate into charcoal. Instead the rich flavour, I may turn it into ashes of darkness. Hahaha…

If you do not like to eat chocolate bar (such as Cadbury, Lindt etc.), you can try eating chocolate with donut, pastry, cake, muffin, marshmallow or wafer. If you want some extravagance, try the chocolate fountain and try it with everything you have in the pantry. Please, not the onion.

A Chocolate Sculptures by Amaury Guichon. Photo from, Pinterest

Nowadays, there are no limitations to be creative with chocolate. You can build a house, a knight, create an enchanted forest or make shoes from chocolate. We have more than a flavour of chocolate, such as matcha, milky, coffee, mint and hazelnut. If they do not have flavour that you want, they can create it. No worries!

Hurm, maybe I can request a bouquet of flowers made from chocolate for my birthday. Sounds interesting! Flowers of lily and carnation with different kind of flavours, mint, coffee, milk, caramel, and hazelnut. The sweetness of chocolate mix together with the minty mint flavour, so refreshing. The caramelize flavour combine with the bitterness of dark chocolate, enhance the taste of it. Oh, I need to stop this dream before it getting wild.

What is your preference for chocolate? Share in the comment.