For Ildi’s request

At the beginning of my teaching carrier I became the form master of 36 girls who were just 14 years old.  Their chosen specialisation was kindergarten teaching. Almost all of them lived in the school’s student hostel, far from their families.

 Being pretty young, almost without any teaching practice, it was a challenge to teach them, help them, being an adult teacher’s figure.  However, I was more like their older sister than their form master. 

Nowadays they are adult women who are kindergarten teachers, teachers, working in the field of social service.  Nice, responsible people who I am so proud of. 

One of them, Ildi has been living in Seattle, the USA where she has found her mate, husband and having an adorable little son. She works at the local elderly home, care about elderly people there, even organises programmes of Hungarian culture.    

For her request I’m going to write about a hobby of mine, making praline.

The beginning leads to another class.

My next class was an 8-year „project”. I got 31 enthusiastic , just 10 years old little children who I tried to help in their studies as their form master, literature, history and language teacher  for 8 years.

One of them, Zsuzsi became a master of arts, even wrote her Ph.D. thesis. A few years ago she made her decision and started to follow another dream: praline making and baking.

She is a successful gastro-blogger as well who shares her experience.

She became my online teacher on the net. I started to follow her posts from the end of 2010 and tried making pralines. 

There is a lot of professional information on the net how to make home-made, quality pralines. I can’t/ don’t want to compete with them.

Of course lots of practices make the “master”, but this is a kind of hobby which makes everybody happy around us, even the result is not perfect. 

To avoid any misunderstanding: I don’t have cocoa plantation, I don’t make chocolate. I use good quality chocolate bar or chocolate pastille which contains at least 60% cocoa or more. I melt the chocolate, temper it and make chocolate shells in special silicon or polycarbonate mould.

                                                                          photo: Csaba Palatinusz
                                                                         

 The filling is what makes these pralines special. I use lots of seasonal fruits raised in our garden, I don’t use preservatives and artificial colouring. Lactose intolerance is a matter in my family, so instead of cream I use coconut milk/cream.  

There are some favourites according to fillings:

The top one is the lemon-ginger, but the home made  “bounty”, the brown beer+ blackberry combination or fig+ nut+ orange + cinnamon+honey are also popular. Strawberry+rhubarb and peer+nut with some rum are also great. 

                                                                           photo: Csaba Palatinusz

Of course, the exotic ingredients are not from our garden…:D

Let’s talk some photos I took in the last few years. 

 And finally a home made birthday cake decorated with pralines. It is made of traditional Esterházy style.