Quebecois Back-to-School Dinner (Je me souviens)

What a school year this has been! So different and so wonderful. I always write these posts in the summer and am amazed, looking back, at how long ago the beginning of the school year feels! It feels especially far-off this year because last August, we were in Quebec! The first few days were a shock of adjustment and discomfort, but by the time we had our back-to-school dinner we already loved where we lived. We learned so many things that can't be quantified in these homeschool posts! I did write a lot about our life in Quebec on my other blog, but it's hard to overstate the educational value—for our entire family—of living there!

Quebec's motto is "je me souviens," meaning "I remember." And I knew immediately this must be our family theme for the year as well. Not just because I wanted everyone to remember this unusual experience, but because I wanted them to remember who they became through that opportunity, and to whom they owed their gratitude—our Heavenly Father and our Savior Jesus Christ.

The thought of remembering has become a meaningful theme for me personally as I have pondered and digested our experience in Quebec, even after we've returned home.

I got forget-me-not necklaces for all of the girls to wear and remember Quebec.

And I got the boys forget-me-not ties!

I decided to make a bunch of traditional Quebecois foods for our dinner, and it was super fun to learn about the different traditional foods and where they came from. We had had some of these things at the cabane à sucre that we visited and I thought I might be able to even improve on some of them.😄 But it was a lot of cooking, and in our rental house kitchen I did not have all the things I had back at home, so there was definitely some flexibility and substitution needed too! 

Since I knew I would have to be cooking all afternoon, I put the kids 100% in charge of decorations. We didn't have craft supplies, nor a printer, nor any of the things we might usually be able to get through Amazon or borrow from a neighbor—but that actually made it SO fun! We had paper and markers we'd bought for the little boys, and I did manage to find some forget-me-not napkins, and then the kids improvised all the rest!

Busy with all the preparations…

Goldie and Clementine picked flowers and berries from our yard and put them all over the dining room. They looked beautiful.

Daisy and Ziggy (and maybe Teddy and Junie too? And Goldie?) made little forget-me-nots to put all over the walls, and a lovely "Je me souviens" sign.

Ziggy drew a Quebec flag!

I put some quotes about remembering up on the walls, and we talked about the word "savor," related to the French "savoir," to know. You come to truly know something when you remember and savor it. I found little journal notebooks to give the kids also, to write about their experiences in Quebec so they could "savor" them and have all those things as "souvenirs" in their memory later on.

The kids set a beautiful table, using the drink shaker (whatever that is called) as a vase 😄

Everyone got dressed up, and Daisy even curled Clementine's hair!

(Oh, this makes me miss our balcony!)

Junie spent all day doing a zillion tiny braids in her hair. I don't know if it was really in honor of our back-to-school dinner as such…but it looked cute!

The food

Maple sugar pie

Somehow I didn't get a picture of us all together. But all the kids were there, from Malachi on down.

It was a back-to-school dinner we will always remember!

Orange Cream Chocolates

I have heard this kind of chocolate center called a "fondant" center, and maybe that's correct, but I don't like it because it sounds like the kind of fondant frosting people put on wedding cakes, which is disgusting (in my opinion). They are also called buttercream centers, which is better but also evokes, to me, a not-very-good frosting. I think a better name is just cream (or crème? if we are feeling French?) centers because that sounds delicious, and these ARE delicious! 

I have never attempted dipping any kind of chocolate except caramels before. (Although Sam's grandma helped me do it with her once, when the kids were very little.) We watched the video on the Gygi site and followed this recipe for our centers. We thought it was very clear to follow and they turned out great!

I will reproduce the recipe here, since links have a way of dying out in a few years.

Cream Centers for chocolates

1 cup heavy cream

½ cup milk

2/3 cup white Karo Syrup

4 ½ cup sugar

¼ tsp salt

2/3 cup Marshmallow Crème

1. Stir all but marshmallow crème in heavy, 6-8 qt. pot. Bring to boil. Cover with lid for 30 seconds to steam down crystals. Continue stirring and cook to 228º F Salt Lake elevation (or 237° F sea level) on a candy thermometer.

2. Remove from heat and pour, without scraping pan, onto marble slab. Let it cool until a flick of your finger into the candy takes a few seconds to recover.

3. Add marshmallow cream and beat with a flat utensil or putty knife until candy begins to lose its gloss—about 10 min. Let candy rest for 1-2 min. Resume beating until candy begins to stiffen and loses its gloss.

4. Divide and flavor as desired, or add flavoring to entire batch at beginning. Shape into walnut-sized balls (make a rope, cut, shape in Pam-sprayed hands), place on Pam-sprayed parchment, and let sit, covered, overnight or for several hours to form thin crust. Dip.

NOTES

To make other flavors: 

Raspberry: process 1/2 cup of freeze-dried raspberries in a blender and sift out seeds using a fine strainer. Beat raspberry powder into the center mixture. 

Orange Cream: 1 ½ teaspoon Boyajian orange oil, and (if desired) zest of one orange, finely chopped. Lemon: 1 ½ teaspoon lemon oil, and zest of lemon, finely chopped. 

The process of making these is interesting. We used a marble slab for cooling and beating the buttercream (the cheese board Sam gave me a couple years ago!) but I read somewhere that you can use any natural stone countertop like granite, too. I think our counters are quartz so maybe that would work? Not sure. Anyway, we happened to have this slab and it worked well. (Update: yes. The counter works. But it takes longer to cool.)

You just cook the ingredients on the stove and when they get up to the right temperature, you pour the mixture onto the stone. It wants to run off, and did run off for us unless we chased it with our spatulas, but after a minute or two it sets more firmly.

Then you fold it and beat it to cool it. We used my bench scraper and that worked best because it's firm and wide. But a regular metal spatula was okay too.

You work it around, lifting and folding over and over.

And suddenly, it changes from a sticky/stretchy liquid into this beautiful fluffy solid! It's like magic!

Then you just form balls out of it, let them set a bit, and dip them in chocolate!

We used orange extract and orange zest for our first attempt, which was delicious, but we had to use lots of extract and still felt the orange flavor could have been deeper. For our second attempt, we got the orange oil recommended in the recipe, and it was SO good! Much better than the extract. We are excited to try to the lemon and lime oils that came with it, too.

We also made raspberry flavor with some freeze-dried raspberries, and it tasted really good, but our raspberries were quite old and had turned an ugly brownish color. Even with pink food coloring added, it didn't have the best visual appeal. So we are also anxious to try this recipe again with some fresh (freeze-dried) raspberries. The orange was my favorite, though! Next to the caramels, which will always be my VERY favorite kind of chocolates.

Our vast amounts of chocolates! Seems like they should last longer than they do…

So delicious!

Making truffles and chocolate-covered caramels

I thought these chocolate-dipped caramels were the best we'd ever made, but looking at last time, I'm not totally sure—they were pretty beautiful last time too. I don't know why we don't make these more often. Well, of course I know—they are time-consuming, and it's a big project to get everything out and put it away—but for how good they are, it isn't THAT hard. Every once in a while Sam will get me some chocolates from our favorite place in Salt Lake, Hatch Family Chocolates. They are delicious and so expensive. About $50 for a box of twenty-four.

We figured out that we can make the same amount of these chocolate caramels, even if we buy the nice dipping chocolate from Gygi, for about a third of that price. And we can easily make three times the amount for very little more work.

I understand why they charge so much! It is hard work, finicky, done by hand, and you probably have to factor in expensive equipment (a tempering machine is a few hundred dollars even for a small one) and maybe some failed batches. But we still thought, after seeing how well our own chocolates turned out and how good they tasted (just as good as Hatch's…if we do say so ourselves…and maybe, to my taste, even better!) that maybe we could try our hand at selling these at Christmas time or for Valentine's Day. I think the girls could make some good money doing that!

While the taste of our chocolates is great, our dipping technique is a work in progress. We got better as we went along!

Truffles

Caramels

We re-used the chocolate box we got from our Mrs. Cavanaugh's field trip to hold our own chocolates. Daisy made a beautiful little label for it.

We made up a box to give to Abe and my mom (he was living at her house at the time).

They were SO GOOD. I wish we still had some! We also tried our hands at raspberry and orange cream centers, which provided some delicious variety to the box, but I will put those in a different post!