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which_chick) wrote2011-04-10 10:29 pm
which_chick) wrote2011-04-10 10:29 pm
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I am pleased to announce that the chocolate project has been completed. All chocolate fillings (caramel, peanut-butter, caramel-with-peanuts, chocolate truffle, coconut, coconut-with-lime) have been made. All fillings have been shaped and pieced and dipped and color-decorated for easy identification.
Chocolates is not hard. Chocolates is pretty easy. There are a couple of discrete steps that you have to master, but basically this shit is not difficult. Fucking Godiva is a racket, damn it all. A very attractively packaged racket with high-end marketing, but a racket still.
Stuff you need to know about chocolates.
1. Chocolate melts at something close to body temperature. Too much heat will kill the chocolate and then it will look like shit when it sets up. Use a double-boiler sort of setup but I believe that a "real" double boiler makes it too easy to overheat the chocolate. I have better luck with a small saucepan held by hand over a wide frying pan of warm water. Melt the chocolate mostly not-on-the-heat and be stirring and stuff. Touch bottom of small saucepan with hand frequently to make sure it's not too warm. I've never had problems with 'losing temper' on the chocolate. The cookbooks, I think, make this whole "temper" business sound harder than it is. Don't get that shit too hot. Take your time melting it and you'll be good. Stop adding heat when chocolate still has some lumps. Oh, and buy the chips. Way cheaper than the bars. I used Ghirardelli 60% dark chips for this project. One bag of their chips is about enough to coat 40 1" diameter filling lumps. (I don't know shit about milk or white chocolate because I don't like to eat it.)
2. You can re-melt the chocolate for later. Use a spatula to scrape out the small saucepan -- just pour out the leftover chocolate on a piece of parchment paper. Break it up into chunks when you go to reheat it and it'll be fine, even if it looks kind of striped when it sets up.
3. Dipping candy into chocolates is a lot easier with the proper tools. You do not need the tools they sell on amazon.com. You need something that looks kind of like an "egg coloring tool" for Easter only sturdier. I made mine using a pair of needlenose pliers and the ground out of a piece of 12/3 copper wire. :) A handy sort of person could figure out what size would be appropriate by deciding first about what size chocolates they'd like to make (my suggestion: round ones, somewhere between 3/4" and 1" in diameter) and then building the tool to suit. DO NOT try that "coat the centers using your hands" bullshit -- it's just a trainwreck of chocolate mess. NO. That is wrong. Embrace your hominidity and make a fucking tool.
4. You don't have to melt a huge amount of chocolate at one time. Working in smaller batches, like half a bag of chips at a time, was a lot easier for me to manage. Use a small saucepan to melt the chocolate in, and then use a dishtowel or whatever to prop it in a "tilted" position so that the chocolate puddle is deep enough to work with.
5. You don't have to submerge the candy center. You can kind of plop it in there, roll and flip it over with your dip tool, and then pull it out, fully coated. Scrape the extra chocolate off the bottom of the dip tool like twice and then nudge the coated center onto parchment paper to dry. If you've done a decent job of scraping off the extra chocolate, you will not have a big foot on the bottom of the piece as it sets up. If you have a foot, you can trim the foot off with a knife once the chocolate has set up some... and make a mental note to work on your skills for the next time.
6. Candy centers for dipped chocolates need to be pretty soft. (I really like numbered lists, y'know? I really do. That's why this is a numbered list.) They taste better and eat more easily if they are sort of soft. Think about box chocolates that you've eaten and you'll have an idea of what I mean by sort of soft. Like the insides of a 3 Musketeers bar, and I realize that those innards are pretty soft largely because air is free, but like that. Only not air. The downside here is that properly soft/wet candy centers are difficult to handle BEFORE they are dipped. I found the freezer/fridge an invaluable tool for solving this problem.
7. The Joy of Cooking, while a very usefulenginecookbook, does not know shit about proper candy centers. The internet, similarly, does not know shit about proper candy centers. (I find most dipped chocolates way too fucking sweet. Most dipped coconut things do not have enough coconut. Most caramel is tooth-hurtingly sugary. Blah, blah, blah. I feel that dipped chocolate candy is a good idea that generally suffers from poor and ill-considered execution. That's why I embarked on the Easter Candy Project, really.) If you really want proper fillings for your hand-dipped chocolates, make your own recipes.
8. Guidelines for filling recipes. First of all, realize the extreme freedom that is to be had by working in small batches. You are not working in gold leaf, here. This shit is fairly inexpensive. You can come up with what works BEFORE you spend the rent on ingredients... and if you screw the pooch, you shitcan the failure, chalk it up to learning, and move forward to success or at least more interesting mistakes. Second, you can taste as you go and if you add your sweetener/binder/whatsis slowly, you can probably stop before you hit "inedible". Taste as you go.
Plain coconut filling: Boil down a can of coconut milk until it's just the "cream" that will be solid when it's cold. Chill to make sure that this is the case. If not, boil more. Add about half the volume of the coconut milk stuff that you get to a bag, more or less, of Baker's Secret pre-sweetened coconut flakes. Stir it up well. Add powdered sugar, a little at a time, until the mixture is dry enough to suit you. Remember, wet is not a bad thing for this filling and we're going to freeze this stuff so that it sets up enough to dip. The coconut flakes should kind of hold together like bad play-doh.
Lime coconut filling: See above, but add "lime extract" which is made from juice of two limes, zest of two limes, 3 Tbsp sugar, that cooked until it's not grainy. You will not need all the "lime extract" that you make... not sure what you should do with the leftovers. Taste as you go with the lime extract, as it's pretty strong.
Peanut butter filling: Buy hippie peanut butter (the kind where the only ingredient is "peanuts", that you need to stir and stuff.) and stir it up. Dish out a filling-sized amount. Add salt/stir until it tastes more peanutty than when you started. Now, add powdered sugar until the stuff is sweet enough to suit and thick enough to be formed. Remember about SOFT/WET for chocolate fillings. Do not get the peanut filling too thick. Some people use honey for part of the sweetener here, but my audience does not like honey so I went with just powdered sugar.
Chocolate truffle: using the same 60% dark chocolate chips you are using for coating, kinda-sorta melt them as for melty chocolate coating. And then add in heavy cream. With a mixer, mix. I started with the Joy of Cooking proportions but that looked like it would set up firmer than I wanted, so I just added more cream and beat the shit out of it with my mixer until I thought it looked appropriately truffle-y. I realize that this sort of half-assed guideline is somewhat disheartening to beginner candymakers, but sometimes you just have to do what you think is a good idea. My chocolate truffle stuff is so awesome I have trouble not eating it all right now.
Caramel: I have a caramel recipe that works very well and that I have used to great success on many previous occasions as actual caramel candy. However, it is firmer than I think is appropriate for candy centers. Since I know that how firm the caramel gets is a feature of how far it's cooked after the cream/butter is added, I figured I would just cook my caramel to a lower temperature (like 247 instead of 250). It'd be awesome if I could claim I looked up what temperature was "soft ball" or whatever in the candy part of the Joy of Cooking but I totally didn't do that. I just eyeballed that shit. LIKE A BOSS. I used 247 because that seemed like a good idea. Caramel came out soft and fucking delightful. Go me!
Caramel with peanuts: See Caramel, and then add one's own roasted peanuts in a line down the center of the stuff after the caramel is poured out onto parchment paper and before it is rolled up into a roll. Work while caramel is pretty warm yet so that you get good peanut covereage without gaps. Peanuts may be whole or chopped, doesn't matter.
9. Forming candy centers. I very quickly decided that all my chocolates would be rounded disk-like things because this was the easiest and fastest shape to form. People who make truffle balls and coat them in cocoa are insane. Fuck that. I am not making anything into balls. Seriously. What you want, from your candy center fillings, is uniformity and ease of forming. What you NEED is parchment paper. Take filling. Put it in a more-or-less even line that runs about 4" in from the near edge of the paper. Go for an amount that looks like it will make a 1" diameter roll. No, I don't know how to tell you how to tell how much that is. I just look at it, okay? Once you've got your filling laid out, tuck the near edge of the parchment paper over and around your stuff (you use the parchment paper to keep the filling and shit off your fingers) and curl your fingers towards you to kind of firm up the filling into a more-round shape. Smooth it out from middle to ends, too, to sort of even things up. Roll up the filling in the parchment paper. Put the whole mess in the freezer so that it can set up. I generally let the centers sit there in the freezer for a day or two while I did other stuff. It doesn't hurt them to hang out in the freezer until you have time to screw around with chocolates again.
10. Slicing candy centers. Candy centers do not actually slice well just out of the freezer. They need about forty minutes in the fridge to warm up enough to slice. In particular, the peanut butter and caramel sorts will shatter if they are too cold when you go to slice 'em. The coconut and truffle fillings are somewhat more tolerant of frozen-slicing. Unwrap center roll, use knife to slice into bite-size pieces. This shit is not rocket science, campers. You can handle it. Uniformity will impress people with the professionalism of your product, if you care about shit like that. I generally refreeze centers once they have been sliced so that they'll be properly frozen when I go to dip them.
11 Dipping candy centers. Since you are working with frozen centers, you need to work quickly and not fart around. Chocolate sets up right quickly on a frozen center. Also, you will need to keep an eye on the temperature of your chocolate -- the centers will cool the chocolate down and as it cools, it won't flow well enough to do a good job of coating the centers. (You'll kind of a get a feel for this crap after the first fifty or so chocolates that you do. Chocolate is almost ideal for dipping when it sheets off of your dip tool. If it doesn't do that, it's getting cold.) You may think that putting the chocolates on wire cookie cooling trays or some shit to set up is a good idea. It is not a good idea. USE PARCHMENT PAPER. Srsly. It's great stuff.
If you don't want to make your people guess which chocolates are which flavors, you can color-code 'em. I did royal icing for mine. In the process, I discovered that I am totally craptacular at icing decorations for chocolates. Godiva has me beat on that front, anyway. I gave up and just did different colored dots for the different flavors.
Chocolates is not hard. Chocolates is pretty easy. There are a couple of discrete steps that you have to master, but basically this shit is not difficult. Fucking Godiva is a racket, damn it all. A very attractively packaged racket with high-end marketing, but a racket still.
Stuff you need to know about chocolates.
1. Chocolate melts at something close to body temperature. Too much heat will kill the chocolate and then it will look like shit when it sets up. Use a double-boiler sort of setup but I believe that a "real" double boiler makes it too easy to overheat the chocolate. I have better luck with a small saucepan held by hand over a wide frying pan of warm water. Melt the chocolate mostly not-on-the-heat and be stirring and stuff. Touch bottom of small saucepan with hand frequently to make sure it's not too warm. I've never had problems with 'losing temper' on the chocolate. The cookbooks, I think, make this whole "temper" business sound harder than it is. Don't get that shit too hot. Take your time melting it and you'll be good. Stop adding heat when chocolate still has some lumps. Oh, and buy the chips. Way cheaper than the bars. I used Ghirardelli 60% dark chips for this project. One bag of their chips is about enough to coat 40 1" diameter filling lumps. (I don't know shit about milk or white chocolate because I don't like to eat it.)
2. You can re-melt the chocolate for later. Use a spatula to scrape out the small saucepan -- just pour out the leftover chocolate on a piece of parchment paper. Break it up into chunks when you go to reheat it and it'll be fine, even if it looks kind of striped when it sets up.
3. Dipping candy into chocolates is a lot easier with the proper tools. You do not need the tools they sell on amazon.com. You need something that looks kind of like an "egg coloring tool" for Easter only sturdier. I made mine using a pair of needlenose pliers and the ground out of a piece of 12/3 copper wire. :) A handy sort of person could figure out what size would be appropriate by deciding first about what size chocolates they'd like to make (my suggestion: round ones, somewhere between 3/4" and 1" in diameter) and then building the tool to suit. DO NOT try that "coat the centers using your hands" bullshit -- it's just a trainwreck of chocolate mess. NO. That is wrong. Embrace your hominidity and make a fucking tool.
4. You don't have to melt a huge amount of chocolate at one time. Working in smaller batches, like half a bag of chips at a time, was a lot easier for me to manage. Use a small saucepan to melt the chocolate in, and then use a dishtowel or whatever to prop it in a "tilted" position so that the chocolate puddle is deep enough to work with.
5. You don't have to submerge the candy center. You can kind of plop it in there, roll and flip it over with your dip tool, and then pull it out, fully coated. Scrape the extra chocolate off the bottom of the dip tool like twice and then nudge the coated center onto parchment paper to dry. If you've done a decent job of scraping off the extra chocolate, you will not have a big foot on the bottom of the piece as it sets up. If you have a foot, you can trim the foot off with a knife once the chocolate has set up some... and make a mental note to work on your skills for the next time.
6. Candy centers for dipped chocolates need to be pretty soft. (I really like numbered lists, y'know? I really do. That's why this is a numbered list.) They taste better and eat more easily if they are sort of soft. Think about box chocolates that you've eaten and you'll have an idea of what I mean by sort of soft. Like the insides of a 3 Musketeers bar, and I realize that those innards are pretty soft largely because air is free, but like that. Only not air. The downside here is that properly soft/wet candy centers are difficult to handle BEFORE they are dipped. I found the freezer/fridge an invaluable tool for solving this problem.
7. The Joy of Cooking, while a very useful
8. Guidelines for filling recipes. First of all, realize the extreme freedom that is to be had by working in small batches. You are not working in gold leaf, here. This shit is fairly inexpensive. You can come up with what works BEFORE you spend the rent on ingredients... and if you screw the pooch, you shitcan the failure, chalk it up to learning, and move forward to success or at least more interesting mistakes. Second, you can taste as you go and if you add your sweetener/binder/whatsis slowly, you can probably stop before you hit "inedible". Taste as you go.
Plain coconut filling: Boil down a can of coconut milk until it's just the "cream" that will be solid when it's cold. Chill to make sure that this is the case. If not, boil more. Add about half the volume of the coconut milk stuff that you get to a bag, more or less, of Baker's Secret pre-sweetened coconut flakes. Stir it up well. Add powdered sugar, a little at a time, until the mixture is dry enough to suit you. Remember, wet is not a bad thing for this filling and we're going to freeze this stuff so that it sets up enough to dip. The coconut flakes should kind of hold together like bad play-doh.
Lime coconut filling: See above, but add "lime extract" which is made from juice of two limes, zest of two limes, 3 Tbsp sugar, that cooked until it's not grainy. You will not need all the "lime extract" that you make... not sure what you should do with the leftovers. Taste as you go with the lime extract, as it's pretty strong.
Peanut butter filling: Buy hippie peanut butter (the kind where the only ingredient is "peanuts", that you need to stir and stuff.) and stir it up. Dish out a filling-sized amount. Add salt/stir until it tastes more peanutty than when you started. Now, add powdered sugar until the stuff is sweet enough to suit and thick enough to be formed. Remember about SOFT/WET for chocolate fillings. Do not get the peanut filling too thick. Some people use honey for part of the sweetener here, but my audience does not like honey so I went with just powdered sugar.
Chocolate truffle: using the same 60% dark chocolate chips you are using for coating, kinda-sorta melt them as for melty chocolate coating. And then add in heavy cream. With a mixer, mix. I started with the Joy of Cooking proportions but that looked like it would set up firmer than I wanted, so I just added more cream and beat the shit out of it with my mixer until I thought it looked appropriately truffle-y. I realize that this sort of half-assed guideline is somewhat disheartening to beginner candymakers, but sometimes you just have to do what you think is a good idea. My chocolate truffle stuff is so awesome I have trouble not eating it all right now.
Caramel: I have a caramel recipe that works very well and that I have used to great success on many previous occasions as actual caramel candy. However, it is firmer than I think is appropriate for candy centers. Since I know that how firm the caramel gets is a feature of how far it's cooked after the cream/butter is added, I figured I would just cook my caramel to a lower temperature (like 247 instead of 250). It'd be awesome if I could claim I looked up what temperature was "soft ball" or whatever in the candy part of the Joy of Cooking but I totally didn't do that. I just eyeballed that shit. LIKE A BOSS. I used 247 because that seemed like a good idea. Caramel came out soft and fucking delightful. Go me!
Caramel with peanuts: See Caramel, and then add one's own roasted peanuts in a line down the center of the stuff after the caramel is poured out onto parchment paper and before it is rolled up into a roll. Work while caramel is pretty warm yet so that you get good peanut covereage without gaps. Peanuts may be whole or chopped, doesn't matter.
9. Forming candy centers. I very quickly decided that all my chocolates would be rounded disk-like things because this was the easiest and fastest shape to form. People who make truffle balls and coat them in cocoa are insane. Fuck that. I am not making anything into balls. Seriously. What you want, from your candy center fillings, is uniformity and ease of forming. What you NEED is parchment paper. Take filling. Put it in a more-or-less even line that runs about 4" in from the near edge of the paper. Go for an amount that looks like it will make a 1" diameter roll. No, I don't know how to tell you how to tell how much that is. I just look at it, okay? Once you've got your filling laid out, tuck the near edge of the parchment paper over and around your stuff (you use the parchment paper to keep the filling and shit off your fingers) and curl your fingers towards you to kind of firm up the filling into a more-round shape. Smooth it out from middle to ends, too, to sort of even things up. Roll up the filling in the parchment paper. Put the whole mess in the freezer so that it can set up. I generally let the centers sit there in the freezer for a day or two while I did other stuff. It doesn't hurt them to hang out in the freezer until you have time to screw around with chocolates again.
10. Slicing candy centers. Candy centers do not actually slice well just out of the freezer. They need about forty minutes in the fridge to warm up enough to slice. In particular, the peanut butter and caramel sorts will shatter if they are too cold when you go to slice 'em. The coconut and truffle fillings are somewhat more tolerant of frozen-slicing. Unwrap center roll, use knife to slice into bite-size pieces. This shit is not rocket science, campers. You can handle it. Uniformity will impress people with the professionalism of your product, if you care about shit like that. I generally refreeze centers once they have been sliced so that they'll be properly frozen when I go to dip them.
11 Dipping candy centers. Since you are working with frozen centers, you need to work quickly and not fart around. Chocolate sets up right quickly on a frozen center. Also, you will need to keep an eye on the temperature of your chocolate -- the centers will cool the chocolate down and as it cools, it won't flow well enough to do a good job of coating the centers. (You'll kind of a get a feel for this crap after the first fifty or so chocolates that you do. Chocolate is almost ideal for dipping when it sheets off of your dip tool. If it doesn't do that, it's getting cold.) You may think that putting the chocolates on wire cookie cooling trays or some shit to set up is a good idea. It is not a good idea. USE PARCHMENT PAPER. Srsly. It's great stuff.
If you don't want to make your people guess which chocolates are which flavors, you can color-code 'em. I did royal icing for mine. In the process, I discovered that I am totally craptacular at icing decorations for chocolates. Godiva has me beat on that front, anyway. I gave up and just did different colored dots for the different flavors.