HOOKED ON POPPING CANDY

Ever since I had discovered the Heston Blumenthal Chocolate popping candy cake via Chubby Hubby's blog, I have been hooked! Although I do admit that I have not tried out the recipe in it's entirity yet, I have been making lots of fun chocolates out of the popping candy base part. Last week, I went around sharing bits and pieces of the amusing chocolate to friends, family and colleagues at work presenting the sweet with the undercover name of "chocolate with caramel crisps"- as the popping candy kinda looked like bits of caramel...to only see their reaction a few minutes later as they were laughing away and recalling memories of their childhood, and realizing that the caramel cover up was just a bluff.
I really love sharing food that can produce this kind of effect!
And one thing that helped me this time was ordering the popping candy online. As I had stated in my previous post, it was extremely difficult finding popping candy in the first place here in Paris, and when I did find it, it was always accompanied with a lollipop. So I ordered about 50 packs of popping candy on a UK website called KeepItSweet. It was my first time ordering through them, so I was a bit skeptical, but when the order was in my mailbox a few days later I was very pleased and will definately consider buying through them again for any future Fizz Wiz needs (Fizz Wiz is the UK name for Pop Rocks- they are both manufactured by the same company too I believe).
As I've mentionned before, it's easy to make but you have to be very careful about not letting a single drop of water accidently jump into your mixture during the preparation!
Recipe for popping candy chocolate, based on an extract of Heston Blumenthal's cake recipe:

Ingredients:

85g whole hazelnuts
40g milk or dark chocolate
2 tsp mixed spice
100g popping candy (the biggest you can find from your local sweet shop)
1 sachet of popping candy for decoration (optional)

Making it:

Preheat the oven to 180C/ 350F/Gas Mark 4 and roast the hazelnuts for about 10 minutes until lightly coloured. Blend to a paste in a food processor, then set aside. Melt the chocolate in a bain-marie (a large basin over a saucepan of simmering shallow water — take care that the water does not touch the basin) and stir in the ginger spice and popping candy. Next, fold in the hazelnut purée. Transfer the mixture onto a rectangular or square mould that has been covered with parchment paper. Optionally, you can then sprinkle a sachet of popping candy over this mixture just for decoration and for the "caramel crisp" bluff. Cover with aluminium paper and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, until hard and when serving break the "popping candy chocolate" bar into pieces to serve.