Baking Belgian 101: Cake Lollies.

I dare you to take a gander as to what i made?!

Awww shit, nevermind... the title gave it away and I can't be arsed to change it anymore. lol. Right now, my brain is churning with many thoughts as to the things I want to blog about. So keeping my word from the previous posts, I finally decided to give it a go and tried baking cake lollies using Belgian chocolate.

Since I'm in the land of chocolates, I planned on experimenting with the various types of chocolates on offer here. So far, I've ended up getting these for my first bake-trial:

1. Cote D'or Culinary Chocolate
2. Galler Chocolate with fillings: raspberry, coffee and vanilla beans.

The end product, here:

Definitely not something for the faint-hearted.

Truth be told this happened a while ago, but I thought that I ought to share my findings with you guys: my first attempt to make cake lollies using Belgian Chocolate. I decided to make them for dad's birthday and he wanted to share them with his fellow office staffs.

Initially I had a problem with the lollipop sticks as they weren't readily available in stores all over Belgium. Wait... scratch that: cake specialty stores in Belgium are SO HARD to find! Let alone, lollipop sticks... so I decided to be a little creative and bought wooden ice-cream sticks instead (you know, the kind that Magnum uses for their ice-creams!)

These sticks were wider than lolly-sticks so I was forced to make each cake-lolly portions bigger than usual, which meant one thing: very uber-rich, decadent chocolate cake lollies per bite. I couldn't guarantee that it's everyone's cup of tea because of it's richness. I mean it was sheer plain rich dark chocolate cake lollies.

I test-sampled it to factor in the taste and texture of the cake lollies. Yup, it's really really rich. I wouldn't recommend having this kind of treat everyday - perhaps as a rare or occasional bite with coffee or tea? I think it would be a good idea! So... I gave it a try. Made myself a nice hot tea (without sugar) and dipped my cake lolly into it... using it as a stirrer. OMG... double rich!

Now that I think about it, the cake lollies remind me of the chocolate cubes Belgians have with their coffee or hot milk. I'll take a photo of it, when I see it one day to show you guys what I mean, but basically it looks the same as my cake lollies (except the chocolates are in cube... on a wooden stick)

Overall impression: I think it's a tad bit too rich to be eaten by itself unless you're a chocaholic so I've made a note to play around with the idea a bit more to come up with a better version of it - will definitely be updating this blog with that entry.

Perhaps I should try making a local version with popular local ingredients: Speculoos, maybe?