A Private Chocolate Making Class for Valentines Day

Valentines Day in Korea is a bit different from The West. Rather than couples exchanging gifts, Valentine's Day is a day for women to gift their man chocolates, usually homemade.

I wasn't about to try to make chocolates at home with no experience, so I went online shopping for chocolates. However, Coupang's selection was overpriced with low ratings and the Naver stores were confusing. So I did what I always do and went to Instagram hoping Gwangju would have at least one chocolatier in its vicinity.

Actually, Gwangju has quite a few chocolatiers (whom I will most definitely seek out later) but one jumped out to me, specifically because they offered private classes. So I dm'd them, got all the details, and eventually signed up to surprise Ji with a couples chocolate making class for Valentine's Day~

JiEun Saem is a chocolatier who runs Le Chocolat d'Ange in Bongseon-dong, Gwangju. During the Valentine's Day class, we were able to make a large, personalized box of chocolates, as well as two mini boxes, which are so perfect for gifting!

The chocolates we made included:

Strawberry Ganache Hearts

White Ganache with Apricots + Coconut Powder

Vanilla Bean Ganache + Dark Chocolate

and

Dark Chocolate with White Chocolate Lettering

We quickly put our aprons on and got to work!

JiEun Saem did such a fantastic job explaining the process to us and even wrote the instructions on a large whiteboard in English!~

First, we cut up the apricots and formed them with the chocolate mixture~ Them covered them with coconut powder.

Here's a before and after^^

It got quite messy, which was fun -- and rewarding to see them formed into perfect little spheres!

Next, we made the ganache filled chocolates~

Piping them was a bit tricky but Ji did such a great job! His looked much better than mine ㅜㅜ

We popped the chocolates in the freezer while we made the lettered chocolates, then took them out to package them, and WOW ~ we made so many!

While we delicately arranged our chocolates, JiEun Saem even gave us some unique Valentine's Day cards~ We spent some time writing a little message to each other :)

The name of the artist who made these cards is @jisoongii on Instagram if you want to give them a follow.