Guide Program

Tuesday, 11 December 2018

Chocolatiers!

For our final meeting of 2018, we decided to try the Chocolatiers Instant Meeting on the Girls First Platform. This challenge was a lot of fun - and very tasty!

We started with our usual opening, followed by an active game - Everybody's It Tag

Our first activity was Chocolate Transformations, where we learned about the chocolate making process. The group was divided into five groups and each group was given a slip of paper with the description of part of the process - harvesting, fermenting, roasting and winnowing, grinding, and tempering and moulding. Each group had to come up with a way to act out the process described and then the rest of the group tried to guess it. A print-out for this activity can be found on the Girls First Platform. 

We then moved on to If I Were A Chocolatier... and decorated our own chocolate "cakes". For the cakes, we used peanut and dairy-free chocolate brownies and provided icing, sprinkles, small candies, chocolates, and similar decorating supplies. Before starting, everyone was asked to think about what they wanted their "cake" to look like and which supplies they would need. The end results were very creative and we sent them home to be eaten later. 

As people finished their decorating, they moved on to Chocolate Redesign and envisioned their perfect chocolate bar. They were then asked to design a wrapper and explain why their chocolate bar was the perfect one. 

The final activity was Chocolate Taste Test, which was a bit of a challenge as we have a peanut allergy and finding unique peanut-free chocolate was harder than we thought. We ended up using Aero bars, Kit Kats and Smarties. All are peanut-free and the mini-bars came in packs of 10, so each person had their own personal bars to sample. we used the tasting sheet provided on the Girls First platform and had everyone work in Patrols to test each chocolate for look, snap, texture and taste. We all came back together at the end and voted on the best flavour - Kit Kats won and Smarties were surprisingly unpopular!

We ended our meeting with goodbyes for the holidays, reminders about camp in January and closed with Taps.