Its been about a month since my last blog post and I do apologize. Life has been throwing me a few awesome opportunities these past few weeks. You may recall that I was preparing to partake in my first client photo shoot. My part in that project is now complete and what a great experience!
These last few weeks I have been busy trying to get my website going, figuring out and getting things done for my freelance business and discussing new opportunities with different contacts.
During the client photo shoot, I had the opportunity to work side by side with a creative director for a marketing/design agency and for the first time, I also got to play around with some professional lighting equipment such as a Lowel DP Light and Lowel Reflective Umbrella. It was my chance to put what I have learnt over the last few months into practise. I must say that working with umbrellas in food photography is definitely not as forgiving as it would have been working with softboxes. This was one of the first things I learnt about in regards to lighting with food photography, and at least I got to experience and learn first-hand that this is in fact true. But nonetheless, the photo shoot was a success and one can only really learn to improve by experiencing. I have a couple more potential opportunities for other projects - watch this space! :)
Anyway, as Easter is upon us, I wanted to try out this chocolate recipe I stumbled across a few weeks ago in a food magazine - homemade Chocolate Covered Cream Easter eggs!
Chocolate Covered Cream Eggs
recipe adapted from Experience Magazine
(makes approx 16 eggs)
- ¾ cups (175ml) unsalted butter, softened
- ½ cup (125ml) sweetened condensed milk
- 2 tsp (10ml) vanilla extract
- pinch of salt
- 5 cups (1.25L) icing sugar
- yellow and red food colouring
- 10oz (300g) milk chocolate
- 1 Tbsp vegetable shortening
DIRECTIONS
- In a large bowl, beat together butter, condensed milk, vanilla and salt.
- Using low speed of an electric mixer, beat in 4 cups of the icing sugar. Add the remaining icing sugar and, using hands, knead into dough until smooth.
- Place a third of the dough in a bowl and tint orange using the yellow and red food colouring. Make 16 small balls with the orange dough.
- Divide the white dough into 16 pieces and flatten each piece. Then place each orange ball in the centre of each white piece.
- Shape the white dough around the orange ball to form the shape of an egg. Place on a parchment paper lined baking sheet and refrigerate for at least 2 hours or until very firm.
- In a bowl set over hot (not boiling) water, melt chocolate with vegetable shortening.
- Using two forks, stab each egg carefully and dip into the chocolate. Let the excess drip off. Place on a parchment paper lined baking sheet. Drizzle some of the remaining chocolate over the top if desired and refrigerate for about 1 hour or until set.
16 eggs would have been too many for two, so divided all the ingredients by half in order to make 8 eggs. Be warned- these eggs are pretty sweet. 'F' for Federico who complained they were way too sweet.
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