I’m interrupting my long stream of greatly overdue posts to share some pretty exciting news. Just over a week ago a letter arrived in the mail letting me know that I’d been accepted into my Certificate IV Hospitality specialising in Patisserie. I start on Monday.

Quite frankly I’m utterly terrified and incredibly excited all bundled into one neat little package. I’ve gone out and bought my uniform and my tools, I’ve spent forever on the phone to (and lining up in) Centrelink to try and sort out Youth Allowance, and as of the 19th I’ll probably have switched into my Advanced Diploma of Hospitality (Patisserie).

I’m also going to be starting my Master of Arts (Food Studies) in October.

So as a sort of celebration I decided to cook dinner tonight. My friend was round for a much needed catch up, and I thought I’d give mum and dad a reason to miss me. I decided on a Venison & Guinness Pie, and some sort of chocolate dessert.

It was nothing special, I didn’t do anything fancy, but it was pretty delicious and perfect for a horrible rainy night. Really making dinner was really just a reason for me to make dessert.

I’ve been tempted to do something like this for a while, I saw it a while back, and then they had a similar effect Masterchef, and then I saw it again the other night when we were eating at Mantra on King William. Basically it’s a dessert encased inside a chocolate shell (similar to the smashable cake). But instead of breaking the shell with a hammer, you pour a warm sauce over the top so that the chocolate shell just melts away.

I decided to do a small almond chocolate cake, with raspberries and pistachio. Quite frankly I didn’t work the pistachio in there very well, it was barely noticeable, but worth it because a combination of these three things (chocolate, raspberry, pistachio) always looks gorgeous.

My real dilema was how to make my chocolate shell. I didn’t have anything in the house, and the only shops I had available were Cheap as Chips and Big W. I ended up buying a muffin pan with holes in the shape of sports balls, and some balloons. The balloons ended up being the winning method, and I created four chocolate shells.

Everyone absolutely loved them, and it’s quite thrilling in the first few seconds where you wonder whether the sauce will actually melt through the shell. Flavour-wise I feel like it needed more cohesion, and I think with a bit more time to nut it out I can come up with something better. The sheer volume of chocolate was also a bit much, the shell was much more a visual necessity.

So here’s to more exciting things to come, hopefully there will be many more exciting things to share over the future months.