Tempering (or crystallising) our chocolate buttons is easy as long as you remember the basic principles.
Making A Ganache
Ganache is a French term for a mixture of chocolate and cream which is commonly used as a chocolate centre.
Moulding Chocolate
Moulding chocolate is easy if you know how. Always use correctly tempered chocolate and ensure you have tested it first!
Chocolate Tips & Recipes
Looking for some chocolate making tips & recipes? Struggling with chocolate tempering at home? You’ve come to the right place! We love to teach people how to make chocolates on our chocolate making workshops but if you haven’t yet visited us and would like some information on chocolate making then read on.
Chocolate as a Crystal
Chocolate is a crystal and as such it can crystalise in several ways. For chocolate making, we only want it to crystalise in a way where the crystals are tightly packed together which means they reflect light and give the chocolate a shine, creates a clean snap when broken and most importantly, enables the chocolate to shrink when set. This ensures that the chocolate will release easily from the chocolate moulds.
We create the right conditions for tempering chocolate by making sure the temperature is correct and by giving the chocolate movement. Milk, dark and white chocolate are correctly tempered at varying degrees of temperature. Dark is around 31 degrees, milk around 30 degrees and white about 29 degrees.
Handmade chocolates from Chocolate Craft
Tempering Chocolate at Home
When you are tempering chocolate at home, you can do this in various ways. The best way is just to melt the chocolate with a hair dryer on high heat but low power (so the chocolate doesn’t splatter). If you keep stirring the chocolate, it will gradually melt. All you need to do is to keep stirring until the last little piece of chocolate is melted. Always test on a palette knife or ordinary knife. The chocolate should set at room temperature in about 5 minutes. If it doesn’t the chocolate may be too hot. If this is the case, just add a bit more solid chocolate and stir until the chocolate looks thick. Try testing again.
Be careful if you use a microwave. Chocolate can burn easily so you need to give the chocolate short burst of 20 seconds only.
If you are melting chocolate over a bowl of hot water, again just make sure that the chocolate doesn’t over heat and that you keep stirring it.
Our Chocolate Making Workshops
We hope you’ve enjoyed our chocolate making tips & recipes. Good luck with your chocolate making and come and join one of our chocolate making workshops if you need more information or help. Click here to book online.
