Hot Choc

I was really supposed to be chipping away at some of the massive pile of work I've managed to get myself involved in but instead I found myself once again in the kitchen, this time making chocolate.

I did this because cooking is one of the only things that makes me focus entirely on one activity (doing the crossword is another, as is swimming). I decided it wouldn't be too bad if I just spent an hour or so making chocolate as a kind of break from work, considering I've been doing the hard yards for about three weeks now.

Why chocolate? Because after Easter I bought a 1kg bag of Priceline Easter eggs for $3 and soon found out why it was cheap and the last thing on the shelf. So I wanted to melt them down and add a couple of flavours and see if I couldn't make the chocolate better. The eggs were just sitting in the cupboard, waiting to be transformed. Besides which, I'd run out of flour and butter for other baking activities.

I ended up creating three batches, a couple of trays of freckles, a mocha-flavoured batch and a chilli chocolate batch. When I started out melting the chocolate (miraculously remembering my high school food tech teacher's warning never to heat chocolate directly but put a bowl above boiling water instead), my mouth began to water, thinking of all the bowls I would have to lick at the end.

When the chocolate was liquid, I sifted in a couple of tablespoons of pure cocoa and then some organic milk to make the chocolate more flavoursome. For the first batch I poured the mixture into muffin trays that had been lined with hundreds and thousands so that when you tipped them out they'd be all colourful on top.

For the second batch I sifted through mocha flavouring (shh, the powder actually expired last month but I didn't think it would really affect the chocolate). This was actually a bad idea because while I love drinking mochas, I don't really like coffee-flavoured chocolate to eat. This I only realised later on.

For the third batch I sprinkled chilli powder (god knows how much) until I could smell it had chilli in it. I ended up pouring this lot into an oblong container so I could eat it as a block.

However, by the end of the exercise – and I'd barely touched any 'spare' chocolate – I felt ill at the thought of eating chocolate, despite the fact that it all smelled so good. It was like that time I went to Estonia with my Finnish friends and we ate at a chocolate cafe and afterwards I vowed I'd never eat chocolate again. (The funniest thing was the very next day we made a special trip to Fazer, a chocolate shop in Helsinki...).

So now I have almost a kilo's worth of chocolate just hanging around with no one to eat it. What a fool am I.

Even worse, the clean up was a nightmare. Everything I touched turned to chocolate and the stuff really was everywhere. What was supposed to be an hour-long break turned out to be a three-hour kitchen odyssey, with results I can't even bring myself to eat. Oh well. Maybe tomorrow.