Day 22; Magnolia and plain chocolate

 Magnolia


A couple of years ago I began to see lots of chat about Magnolia flowers and their edibility, and most specifically their ginger flavour.  I love ginger in chocolate, and in the early years of the business, I would make a fresh ginger ganache in winter.  However, as my repertoire of winter wild flavours widened, I no longer needed the ginger to fill the gap.  So the thought that we could be wild and have ginger got me very excited.  

I had not noticed many magnolia trees in this area though - and I thought we were maybe too far north for the tree to survive; clearly I was just going around with my eyes shut!  I put a call out on Facebook and lovely gardeners with gorgeous trees invited me to come and pick flowers from their trees.  Now, of course, I see them alot - and many are magnificent, even up here.

There is a ginger flavour to the petals, although not very strong, as well as lots of floral notes.  I have tried crystalising the petals and dipped in chocolate they really do fill that chocolate ginger gap.  This year I dried the bulk of the petals that I collected, and although they go brown in colour, dried carefully they seem to retain the floral ginger notes that are so attractive.  

I chose a lowish percentage cocoa content plain chocolate for this pairing, as I wanted the delicate magnolia flavours to be able to compete.  We used NearyNogs' Ecuador 60% plain chocolate - and the result is just as I wanted it - aromatic and warm.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2025 Advent Calendar

2025 Advent Calendar As this will be our last Advent Calendar, because I am retiring this year, we thought we would look back over the almost 20 years that I have been exploring the chocolate and wild foraged flavour worlds.  So much has happened in the time since I started out on my chocolate journey - the chocolate landscape is totally different now from what it was 20 years ago; then there were no craft bean to bar makers in the UK, and certainly none that you could buy couveture from.  Even buying Fairtrade certified chocolate or any other ethically credentialled chocolate was hard, and there was very little focus on origin and flavour. The foraging world has opened up as well - information is more easily available, there is the Association of Foragers that enables all these individuals to link together.  My foraging knowledge has grown over the years through contacts with other foragers and what they do, with confidence through practice, with more easily accessible i...
Read more

Day 5: Sea buckthorn berry caramel filled chocolate

Image
Sea buckthorn, Hippophae rhamnoides    Sea buckthorn is an amazing plant that we first became aware of in Nepal, where its berries were renowned as having more Vitamin C than any other fruit and where it was a valuable plant for feeding goats as it grows at a very high altitude. We were amazed to find that it grows so well in a coastal sandy environment here in the UK - so different ecologically from the Himalayan mountains. However, its berry is as sour and as Vitamin C rich here as it was there. It has a really strong 'tropical' flavour to it that persists when cooked. Looking up Sea Buckthorn on Wikipedia I was amazed to read that it is now classed as a superfood due to its high levels of anti-oxidants ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_buckthorn ).   There is now an excellent community company based near Gullane, Sea buckthorn Scotland , where they pick and process the berries each year, selling juices, concentrates and many other sea buckthorn wonder-based produ...
Read more

Day 16: Our own bean to bar plain chocolate

Image
Lachua, Guatemala 80% plain chocolate    This is the only unflavoured chocolate in the whole calendar and as this is a reflection on our chocolate journey oer the years, I felt it was important to mark our attempts at bean to bar chocolate This was made with cocoa beans grown by two farmer organisations in the northern area of Alta Verapaz, Lachua region, Guatemala.  Here there is a pristone cenote lake within a national park, and te farmers focus on organic and ecofriendly farming. I bought the beans from Uncommon Cacao, an organisation that sources speciality cocoa from farmers and sells to craft makers.  These beans are sourced from, as explained on their website . Uncommon Cacao was started by CEO Emily Stone in 2010, and is one of a small handfull of ethically driven companies from which you can buy small amounts of cocoa - by which I mean one 50 or 60kg bag to a tonne.  So, not just a small pack for tasters!  Their website is full of information about...
Read more