Valentine’s Day is next Thursday, and to celebrate I came up with this fun kitchen DIY. It would make a great gift for a loved one or friend, and though I kept it short and sweet, you could definitely spell out something more creative.

These look like regular chocolate hearts, but they have a peanut-butter-wasabi-ginger filling.

To make these, you’ll need candy molds. For the hearts, I used this one, which I bought at a local Michaels. They should be pretty easy to find this time of year. But I couldn’t find an alphabet mold locally, so I bought this one online.

If you want shiny pretty candies, you’ll need to temper your chocolate. I simply chopped up my chocolate, heated 2/3 of it over a double boiler while stirring, let it cool slightly, then added the remaining 1/3 of the chocolate and stirred until it melted. Ghiradelli has some slightly more detailed instructions for tempering chocolate here. I figure they must know what they’re talking about when it comes to chocolate. For mine I just used some 72% chocolate I had on hand, but if I were buying the ingredients for this I would definitely splurge on some nice dark chocolate, maybe in the 80% range.

If you want to get fancy and fill your chocolates, coat the bottom and sides of your candy molds with a layer of chocolate. A pastry brush is recommended for this step, but I don’t have one of those, so I used a spoon. Place the chocolate in a freezer to cool for a few minutes while you make the filling.

For the ginger wasabi peanut butter filling:
1 Tbsp natural salted peanut butter
1/2 tsp honey
1/2 tsp fresh ginger, peeled and finely minced
pinch wasabi powder

Mix peanut butter, honey, ginger, and wasabi. Start with just a tiny pinch of wasabi, and add more to taste.

Fill each heart with a small spoonful of the filling of your choice, leaving space on the edges for the chocolate shell. Spoon melted chocolate over the filling, and let cool again. Try not to overfill, or you’ll have to trim off the extra chocolate (this is hard to avoid, though).

If you do need to trim extra chocolate, try to avoid handling the chocolate, or the heat from your hands will dull the shiny finish (this happened to me, oops).

To unmold your chocolate, I found it helpful to slightly bend the plastic mold, until I could see the chocolate come off the back, then hold it face-down and give the back a little flick or thump until the chocolate fell out.

Other ideas for things to spell out: let’s get it on, marry me, run away with me, you’re my favorite, be mine, je t’aime, sweet on you, let’s kiss. I kept it G-rated, but I’m sure you can come up with racier ideas 😉