Some of you may remember that I once sent Los Campesinos! an anonymous box of sweets and chocolates. Thankfully, they never filed for a restraining order. So when I discovered that Allo Darlin’ were coming back to Chapel Hill on their tour for We Come From The Same Place, it was suggested by a friend that I do something similar, except this time, email them ahead of time so it doesn’t seem quite so creepy.

Remember, it was all Tammy’s fault. Nothing to do with me.

Tammy did indeed said the email, and the response was pretty positive, even going as far to ask one of their friends what chocolates we should make, who came back with the idea of:

a soft sea-salt caramel encased in milk chocolate, then covered in dark chocolate, with an extra dusting of sea-salt on top

I think I read that email three times and then bashed my head on the table. Then I composed myself. After all, it only involved tempering two different types of chocolate, casting them one after the other in a mold, making sure not to melt the already-cast chocolate, then piping in a soft-set caramel that has to cool down from 117˚C to 30˚C so as not to melt the milk chocolate and hope that it’s still pipe-able at that temperature…and then…

muffled cries and groans

Obviously, given that start, I did the only thing a sane person would: I decided that I needed to make a 4-piece set, which meant I needed to come up with three other chocolates. Naturally.

It did give me a chance to break in the new chocolate room, though.

From the board, I had my four chocolates, which we matched to Allo Darlin’ lyrics (it seemed appropriate):

• Heartbeat Chilli — a dark chocolate ganache with infused spices to try and replicate Locopops’ Mexican Chocolate locopop (turns out a hint of lime really helps). Cast in a fancy heart mold.

• Capricornia — goat cheese ganache (Capricorn, see, get it? Get it? GET IT? Ahahaha!). Some people think this is a bit odd, but there’s plenty of lemon and it ends up tasting like cheesecake. Cast in my fancy hemisphere molds.

• Allo Darlin’ — it seemed appropriate to name the dark / milk / caramel creation after the band. These ended up just being time-consuming than too difficult, though there was a moment when I was about to turn the mold upside-down to empty out the milk chocolate internal layer when I suddenly realized that the dark chocolate had probably pulled away during tempering…which meant I was about to drop 40 dark chocolate shells into the temperer and then shout a lot. Thankfully, I managed to catch myself before I ruined a lot of chocolate. Then I painted the tops with 83% Valrhona, so there was actually three different types of chocolate in the result.

And, yes, as it turned out, the band’s friend was really onto something with the double-hull. The mixture of the different chocolates, the salt and the caramel was pretty delicious.

• The Shattered Dreams of England — most pretentious name for a chocolate, ever! I was all proud of myself for coming up with this one: a mandarin pâte de fruit in the top with aerated (aero) chocolate filling up the rest of the mold. I remained proud right up until I was idly browsing through my copy of The Fat Duck Cookbook and found exactly the same thing staring back at me. Oops. Anyway, it tasted like a very fancy Jaffa Cake.

The weekend thus lost to chocolate, all that remained was to go to Chapel Hill and hand-deliver the chocolates to a rather excited band. At this point, I would link to a photo of handing them over to the happy band…but I completely forgot to take any pictures. However, they did take some of the chocolates:

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Incredible. Handmade chocolate delivery for us in Chapel Hill, NC!

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The slight downside of arriving at a concert two hours before the doors opening is that you desperately try to not come off as a crazy stalker…which gets harder when you keep bumping into band members as you’re walking around Franklin Street. It wasn’t done on purpose, honest! (but they were all friendly and amazing).

And it all ended up with an amazing concert — it was lovely to hear Tallulah live for the first time, and the new album has been playing here in Durham all week…

…but I still can’t look at chocolate yet. Maybe next week.