It’s not hard to make elegant chocolate confections. This class will provide you with the hands-on experience needed for creating all sorts of chocolate goodies. All it takes are some very common household utensils, a bit of store-bought chocolate plus a few more basic ingredients that you may have at home or, if not, are readily available at local stores.

We will start by gaining experience in some basic chocolate handling techniques like tempering, dipping, and molding. With these skills in hand, in subsequent weeks we will create some very delicious chocolate pieces, including chocolate bars, truffles, chocolate-nut bark, chocolate-covered citrus rinds, dried fruit nibbles, turtles, and mixed-nut rochers. The hands-on work in class for those 50 and over will be supplemented with written recipes, written descriptions, and videos of the techniques employed.

Classes will meet Fridays from 1-3pm from November 15 through December 13 (no class on November 29). Your instructors will be Sydney Kaufman, who has been an amateur chocolatier for some 20 years and Gerry Lapidus, who took some of Sydney’s original chocolate classes and has been dabbling in chocolate for about six years.