Oooh, more chocolates this week too!

After visiting the chocolate factory last week, this week is all to do with chocolates again! In other words, a choc-a-holics dream come true :-D.

Monday and Tuesday this week we were busy making chocolates - both the moulded and the dipped variety. There are 6 of us in our intermediate class at the Academy, and the Chef asked us to each choose 2 moulds to use - so we picked our favourite moulds... and my favourite moulds are the ones that produce chocolate spheres, and chocolate bullets :-D. Once the moulds were selected we then picked our favourite colours or colour combinations of cocoa butter and either sprayed the inside of the moulds with an air brush, or just used a paintbrush, or a toothbrush, or even just a finger, to get some of our preferred colours into the mould.

And here are my selected moulds, with cocoa butter colour swiped in already:

1) The chocolate spheres...

2) The chocolate bullets...

Next, we had to melt our preferred chocolate (dark, milk, or white), temper it, pour into the moulds and then knock out all the extra. This way, we get a nice chocolate lining on the moulds - this will be the shell of the chocolate when it is unmoulded. If tempered properly, when the chocolates are unmoulded you should see a really nice shiny outside, with the cocoa butter colour firmly adhering to the shell!

We then made various fillings (chocolate ganache with flavour or nuts or caramelled). Even strawberry JELLY plus white choc ganache to make a two layer filling!! We piped the various fillings into our chocolate moulds, let them set, then used a bit more tempered chocolate to seal off the openings in the moulds through which we had piped the fillings! These could then be left to set again.

These are my moulds, with chocolate lining done, and all filled with ganache and sealed off...

And here are the final products - the spheres and the bullets unmoulded, and also split open to show the insides...

1) The unmoulded spheres

2) The inside of the spheres. This had caramel chocolate ganache as the filling.

3) The bullets! I think they look gorgeous :-D

4) And the bullet broken open - this one had passionfruit caramel filling, topped off with dark chocolate ganache.

In addition to the above, we prepared chocolate ganache to use for DIPPING chocolates. We spread the various flavoured ganaches out into rectangular frames, which were on parchment paper which already had a thin sheet of tempered chocolate spread onto it. The ganache is evenly spread in the frame, and then left to set. Once it is set we cut the ganache into 2x2cm squares, temper more chocolate, then dip the ganache squares into the tempered chocolate, and let them set again. I made some MONSTER size Rocher chocolates too.

1) This is one of the ganaches we made. Almond chocolate ganache. YUM!

2) And here are the MONSTER chocolates I made - using the almond chocolate ganache, and dipped into tempered dark chocolate for the coating. Most tasty indeed! I will definitely do this at home.

And the following 4 pictures give you a full 360deg view of the table we set up to showcase all the chocolates we produced in the 2 days! Note, this is not ALL the chocolates in terms of numbers, but it is all the chocolates in terms of designs/types. We have at least twice this amount of chocolate not shown here, but only because we didn't want to make the whole layout look cramped and ugly by squeezing too many chocolate into each display tile! Having said that, I'm sure most choc-a-holics would not consider that type of display a bad one :-D

The rest of the week is for building a chocolate showpiece! NOT one of my favourite tasks, as I really consider it such a waste of money to use good chocolate to build something that nobody is going to eat! I did learn the techniques - for making some different types of chocolate flowers, for casting the bigger pieces for the body of the showpiece, for shaping and fine tuning the cast pieces, etc - but this is not something I will be doing at home :-).

One MAJOR plus point of this week (from my perspective anyway) is that I am now far more comfortable with the process of tempering chocolate, and don't panic when handed a huge container of melted chocolate together with a spatula and a scraper! This is good, because I do intend to make these chocolates at home, both the moulded/filled and set/dipped variety, and I do have to know how to temper chocolates for that! So this week has definitely been a good week from that perspective!

That's it for now folks. Till next time, have a good day, every day!