Please, Just Buy Your Chocolate... I’m Begging You

created: 2022.03.15. 11:38 · modified: 2025.12.31. 13:13 ·  · license

This post was automatically translated and has not yet been reviewed by me. Please read with discretion.

I made it for myself, but if you want to try some, come over. If I eat it all, I don’t think I’ll sleep until the semester ends.

It all started with cacao nibs. I bought some because I was curious what they tasted like, but they tasted nothing like chocolate. They were just bitter as hell, so they sat in my cupboard, a nuisance I didn’t know what to do with. While pondering how to use them up, I came up with the grand plan of making chocolate.

Originally, I was going to buy cream or just make it with milk. But then I remembered the electric whisk at my parents’ house and had the terrible thought: couldn’t I make the cream myself? I brought the whisk back with me when I visited last weekend. And so my journey toward chocolate began with the following ingredients.

Ingredients: cream (to be made from butter, milk, eggs, and sugar), butter, cacao nibs, sugar, sunflower seeds (also in need of using up), and an electric whisk that doubles as a hand blender

First, let’s make the cream.

Separate the egg yolks. If you gently pour the leftover whites into something you’re cooking later, they’ll turn into delicious poached eggs.

Pour milk into a pot, add butter, and heat gently until it melts. Then whisk in the egg yolks.

Huh... It looks a little yellow. I should have let the pot cool more before adding the yolks... I’m starting to worry that they cooked while I was whisking them in.

There’s no going back now, so I let it cool and leave it in the fridge overnight.

Add sugar to the chilled mixture as you whisk it. The internet said it would only take 10 minutes, but even after 30 minutes, only some of mine had thickened. Maybe I added too much milk, or maybe the yolks had cooked...

Still, it seems to have thickened somewhat, so now I grind the cacao nibs with a mortar and pestle. Daiso sells the mortar and bowl together for 5,000 won.

I stopped grinding for a bit to go to a dinner appointment. When I took the ingredients back out of the fridge and looked at them from a distance, a thought struck me: What am I doing?
I’d spent at least 30 minutes grinding cacao nibs earlier that day, and had less than 10 ml of fine cacao powder to show for it after sifting. After some deep reflection, I decided to enlist the help of a machine.

The electric blender turned the cacao nibs into powder in no time. It wasn’t as fine as what I’d ground by hand, but it looked usable. I set the fine powder aside to sprinkle over the chocolate bars at the end.
After chilling, the cream(?) had at least started to hold its shape.

Combine the cream, ground cacao nibs, and sugar over a double boiler. Blend the whole mixture, stir it again, and repeat a few times.

Now to prepare the molds for freezing the mixture. I used an ice-cube tray and brushed it with a little cooking oil to make the chocolates easier to remove later.

I’m going to make one-third plain chocolate bars, one-third with sunflower seeds mixed in, and the rest topped with sunflower seeds.

Carefully fill the molds with the mixture.
There was more than I expected, so I filled another mold above it too. But I can already see how that one’s going to turn out...

Now I freeze them overnight, then take them out of the molds.

Hahahahaha
It was a disaster. For one thing, the mixture was too thick to settle against the sides of the mold, and the exposed tops—which would become the bottoms of the bars—hardened all lumpy. Even with oil on the sides and warm water underneath, they wouldn’t come out easily. I ended up prying them out with chopsticks and mangling them in the process. I also broke the ice-cube tray by tapping it with the mortar and pestle. Heh... Next time, I’d be better off spreading the mixture on a plastic bag, letting it set, and cutting it with a knife. If there is a next time.

As I write this, I haven’t even dared to take the other mold out yet.

I tried arranging them nicely on a plate and sprinkling cacao powder over them, but they’re beyond saving.
There’s butter and sugar in them, so they taste okay... Um... If you don’t care at all what food looks like and only care about the taste, come try some.

Chocolate... please just buy it.