Today when we woke up, we realised that Juliet’s food basket had been infested by ants. She poured herself some cereal, took a mouthful and screamed… There were also ants in her cereal! So we scrapped the homemade breakfast idea and headed to our local cafe for a freshly baked chocolate croissant.
Then we walked the half an hour journey into the city centre (well power walked, we were running late after our ant catastrophe) and headed to the chocolate museum to start our master class in chocolate making!
We learnt all about the cocoa bean and how Mosquitos help to pollinate it, then we all tried a raw cocoa bean… Juliet and I were not impressed by the bitter taste of this! After wards we cooked the beans in a hot pot over a flame until they started popping. After peeling the cocoa beans, the shells were used to make us some cocoa tea which was delicious! We each ground up the beans into a paste before realising how difficult it is to do by hand… And then used a machine to finish the job for us! With this paste our cooking teacher made us two drinks that the Mayans used to drink. The first was the 100% cocoa paste with hot water, chile and honey… We were not really fans of this either! The next was 100% cocoa paste, hot milk, cinnamon, cloves and lots of sugar and it was absolutely delicious! It tasted like a Christmas hot chocolate milkshake and we both said we’ll be making this at home. After the drinking session, we learnt about the mixing process of the chocolate that takes 24 hours and then the cooling process which they do by pouring the chocolate out onto a marble table and moving it around until it is at the right temperature.
We then picked our moulds and added all the different flavours we wanted to them, before pouring in our milk chocolate. Juliet and I used m&ms, smarties, oreos, salt, and even quinoa to flavour ours.

We then went and found a cute restaurant with an outdoor eating area, and sat in the sunshine over looking the plaza, for lunch, waiting for our chocolates to set. An hour later they were done! They were pressed out of the moulds and we put them in a cute little bag, tied up with a ribbon and had our very own handmade chocolates!
It was a great day (as you can probably imagine, Juliet and I ate a lot of chocolate in the process…)

This afternoon we both decided we were in need of cute Llama backpacks, so that we could complete our backpacker / traveller look, and have been wandering around feeling very pleased with ourselves with or bags on our back. We went to visit the temple of the sun and there was a live Peruvian band playing on the park beneath it. Right opposite is the cutest cafe with quiches, cakes and pastries and so we have stopped here for dinner!

I’m thinking it’s going to be another movie night tonight after another action packed day.