Oh the wonderful things you can do with good quality chocolate...

On Friday I used several kinds of chocolate to make a large Holiday Pine Cone Wreath Cake.  The cake was a 14" round four-layered GingerSnap Buttercream cake with one half in chocolate and the other in vanilla.  The chocolate cake was made with Camino Organic and Fair Trade cocoa powder and doused in a glaze made of cream and semi-sweet Camino couverture.  The truffles were Espresso Truffles made with Camino Espresso-flavoured dark chocolate bars and rolled in Camino white chocolate couverture and shredded coconut. 

The miniature Pine Cone Cakes were made of chocolate cake carved into oval shapes and dipped in chocolate ganache, then were covered with Callebaut dark chocolate chips that I bought at Bulk Barn. I used Callebaut because they had a flatter shape which made the pine cones look more realistic. They taste wonderful, but the only downside of these chocolate chips is that they have artificial flavour, which is obvious as soon as you taste them (it is also listed on the ingredients list at Bulk Barn). However, these little pine cone cakes are really packed with chocolate and are essentially chocolate heaven for the chocolate fanatic.

The golden-wrapped truffles are eggnog-infused milk chocolate truffles made with fresh eggnog and cream and Camino organic milk chocolate couverture.  The branches are made from chocolate toffee, the same as in my chocolate TOFFLE's (a 70% organic dark chocolate is used for this toffee).  I also tossed a few TOFFLE's around the sides of the cake for additional decoration. The leaves and ribbon (as on the picture above) are made of fondant icing.

So as you can see, many fun things can be done with chocolate!  Just this one cake includes extra dark chocolate, semi-sweet chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate - nearly all of which is Fair Trade and organic.