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The Rocher Project

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When we discovered Pimp That Snack, we instantly knew we were going to take part in this World Wide Pimping Project… it was just a question of what we were going to pimp.  After looking up a wide variety of delicious snacks, we opted for the Ambassador’s choice, The Rocher.

For us the key to our Pimping success would lie in the shell (henceforth known as the waff-er).  This alone took a lot of discussion and a few trial runs before the main event.  However, I’m jumping ahead of myself now, so let me start…

First job of the Project was a stop at our local Asda –

2 large bags of hazelnuts
4 packets of ice cream wafers (waff-ers)
4 jars of chocolate spread
8 bars of milk chocolate
Gold wrapping up paper
Brown cardboard and gold pens and stuff to make it look authentic
(We bought more than we used in the end…)

Estimated cost to make – £9.39

Like I said before, we tried a few different ways of perfecting the waff-er and had come up with what we thought was a brilliant solution. We greased two identical bowls up with butter.  We were thinking ahead and thought it would be good to mould the inside of one of the bowls and the outside of the other bowl so that when they dried crispy and waff-er like, one would almost sit on top of the other.  To achieve successful moulding we dipped the ice cream wafers in some boiling water and then began the weaving and moulding to our greasy bowls.

We needed to bake the waff-er halves on a low heat for a long time, so they don’t burn or cook unevenly.  Our main concern was that the individual wafers would not dry together to form one solid shell.  Luckily one of the Pimping team is a Food Science teacher and she came up with the bright idea of painting egg white on to our structure… Quite genius we thought.  So, we pasted some egg white on and put in the oven for a very long time.  A.  Very.  Long.  Time.

We then set to work on making the chocolate spread insides.  Again, we had issues with the sheer size of The Rocher.  Chocolate spread is blinking heavy stuff and we were worried that our fragile shell would not hold under the weight of the stuff.  Going over thoughts in our collective head we came up with the idea of whipping the choc spread to get as much air in to it as possible, as it was important to us to Keep The Rocher Real.

By the way, on the first whisk of choc spread we decided to add a splash of milk to really get it going.  It went nowhere fast and turned it in to a rather stodgy chocolate mess.  We put that to one side and moved on whisking the next jar of chocolate spread with groundnut oil. 

Once that was sorted out came the waff-er shells.  They were then coated with a sugar syrup… then back in the oven they went…

Then came the task of making the monster nut to go in the middle of The Rocher.  We thought it was important to retain the whole hazelnut appeal, and so to make a monster hazelnut we melted chocolate and stuck whole hazelnuts on it, then added a bit more melted choc and repeat process times loads and you end up with something like this…

See lighter purely for scale purposes.

Once the shells were fully cooled out of the oven… (this took a long time.  In this time we drank beer and ate dinner and drank some more beer, and vodka and ‘Russian’ coffees (coffee, vodka and baileys if you were wondering))

…we dolloped the chocolate spread in to one of the shells.  I say dolloped, but we were actually very careful as we still weren’t too sure of the strength of the waff-er.  We needn’t have worried.  Strong as an ox.

Then we added the Huge Hazelnut

We then piled some more chocolate spread mixture on top of the hazelnut centre, and a smaller amount in to the top half and very very carefully we placed one half on top of the other

Luckily we’d not yet disposed of the stodgy chocolate mess we made earlier.  This proved excellent fortune as it acted perfectly as a chocolate putty, thereby making it very easy stick the two together whilst retaining chocolate heaven.

Then we shoved a whole bag of hazelnuts in the Magimix (other food processors are available) and blitzed them up to a chopped nutty texture.  We melted chocolate in the microwave and mixed them up together…

After cooling the choc-nutty mix in a cold water bain marie we applied to the top half of The Rocher very carefully indeed. We’d placed The Rocher in a baking tray to allow for drippages and then the painting began.  It was at this point that a drawer from the freezer was relegated to the back garden, to sit on top of the barbeque, on a cold January night.  This created enough head space for our fast-approaching-really-resembeling Ferrero Rocher.

After half an hour in the freezer we returned to a very solid looking half Rocher.  We swiftly upturned it and started painting the underbelly…

Once that was done, it was back in the freezer for another half an hour. 

By this time it was 3 in the morning and we’d been at this for 10 hours.  Yes, 10 hours.  Motivation was running low by this point.  What we were greeted with staring back at us from the freezer made us all proud.  We weighed The Rocher and she (well, she was born…) weighed in at 2.2kg (pimped to the power of 159.  Original FR weighs a weeny 14grams)

Bed.   Sleep. 

Next day, feeling fresh as chocolate daisies we set to work on the packaging.

We had done a bit of a Blue Peter job with the cardboard and had prepared that earlier in the week… So it was a matter of scrunching up gold paper, blowing up a copy of the FR logo to place on top and voila! Here our Rocher is in full glory

And, finally, the cross section…  It was here that we made our school-boy error.  In the utter excitement and pride in ourselves we were so overcome with emotion, whilst desperately all getting photos on our phone we FORGOT to take a photo on a REAL camera.  What numptys.  Thank god for the power of modern technology.  I’ve blue-toothed a photo from my phone to my computer.  So, apologies for the poor quality.  I can not believe we did that.  Fools.

We are all very proud of our achievement.  We stand by the fact the key to making a truly authentic FR is the shell.  And we’ve managed it! Yes!

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