No, you are not a day adrift, and amazingly nor am I.
I decided not to post my Through the Lens Thursday yesterday or it would have given away my Valentine treat for my husband and he looks at my blog, so that would not have been much of a surprise!
So here is the photo and how I made the Valentine chocolate treats.
This week’s theme was ‘dull’, so I snapped these sprinkles which are dull in comparison to the usual garish coloured and shiny versions. I took the above photo with my Canon, the rest are taken on the iPhone.
I still call these itsy bitsy sugar balls ‘hundreds and thousands’ and I love them! They are called ‘sprinkles’ here in the States, what do you call them? Crunchy teeth breakers? Teeny coloured balls which look pretty on cupcakes and trifles for a few minutes then melt and bleed a tie dye effect all over the treat? Fairy balls? Nonpareils?
Whatever you call them, I like them best with chocolate on, so I thought I would have a go at making some nonpareils for Valentine’s Day.
Nonpareils were called ‘Dazzle Drops’ when I was little and you could buy them by the quarter pound and get them in a little white paper bag which eventually got the tie dye effect from being held in hot little hands. The chocolate always tasted like cooking chocolate but the crunchy brightly coloured topping was always worth the below par chocolate. As well as the cooking chocolate ones, you could also get white chocolate I would often get a mix of both – tres exotic.
I think nonpareil is the strangest name for a candy/sweetie/chocolate, it sounds like a punctuation mark to me. So, I looked it up in the dictionary where I found that a nonpareil is ‘A person or thing that has no equal’. It is also a bird from the finch family also called a Painted Bunting. And it is both the teeny sugar balls and the final confectionary consisting of said balls atop the chocolate disc. It literally means – no equal. Derived from the French and Latin words which make it up.
Still sounds like punctation to me. ‘Don’t forget your nonpareil in that sentence’….
At best a name which is a little high brow for a crunchy chocolate disc but there you go, I like Dazzle Drops better.
Anyhoo, want to make some?
I got two bars of chocolate because chocolate seems to reduce in mass as it melts. You will also need lots of hundreds and thousands.
For this batch I put the hundreds and thousands on the parchment and blobbed button sized rounds of melted chocolate onto them. Best to let the chocolate cool a tiny bit for the blobbing stage, so that you get nice rounds and not random pools.
In hindsight I would do it the other way round, blob then sprinkle. The way I did it, the chocolate almost devoured the little teeny sprinkles and only a few could be seen. Not so pretty but still yums.
Test a few to make sure they taste nice and then package them up all pretty and hand em over to your lovely Valentine!
For the leafy top, I loosely wrapped some green wool around my hand a few times in an uneven manner and tied it like a pom pom and trimmed open the ends. Almost like a very loose freeform pom pom.
Sew them together using the wool already on the pom, include the ‘leaves’ as you sew the three together.
Fresh from the pom pom garden! Now where is the pea green wool……
Clare Davis Etheridge 
