The challenge – to make those delicious tasting and good-looking soft-centred chocolates you buy for £18 for 10 pieces in places like Melt and Paul A Young. And we did it. It takes time and vigorous stirring but it can be done.
Here’s how – decorate a polycarbonate mould with some coloured white chocolate, pour in some tempered dark chocolate to coat the mould, pipe in some creamy milk chocolate ganache, seal it with more chocolate and let it cool. Give the tray a good bang and out pops these amazing chocolates.
Okay, not quite the finesse of a master chocolatier but we made these ourselves at a class with our fabulous teacher Annamarie Jones at a class in the Bake With Maria lab in London.
If we can do it, any one can. Alan Greenhalgh reports..
ta-da! learn how to make chocolates at Bake With Maria
Decorating the moulds with coloured white chocolate
Moulds and Colours for Chocolate
Coating, filling and sealing the chocolates
Annamarie Jones shows us how to make chocolate at Bake With Maria.
For the decoration you will need some liquid white cocoa butter colour mixed with powdered colours which you can then flick or finger swirl into the mould.
Flick or finger paint before coating the mould with tempered dark chocolate
After the decoration has dried, pour in “tempered” chocolate to coat the mould before draining away the excess for use later in sealing the base.
Coating the mould with tempered dark chocolate
Tempering is the process of stabilising the chocolate so you don’t get bloom – those whitish streaks, but you do get an incredible shine and a loud snap when you break it! Home tempering is done by taking two bowls of chopped chocolate pieces, one you will use to melt the chocolate over water in a saucepan on the hob, the other bowl you will add gradually to the hot melted chocolate to bring the temperature down – and thereby stabilising it.
To begin, always start off with at least 250g of melting chips or chopped chocolate. Once chocolate is melted and heated to the appropriate temperature, “seed” the chocolate by adding roughly 1/3 more unmelted chocolate. Allow the seeded chocolate to blend in and stabilise at its appropriate seeding temperature. Finally, reheat the chocolate ever so slightly until its appropriate temperature is reached.
Melt dark chocolate at 53-58C before “seeding” at 28-29C and reheating for use at 31-32C. Milk chocolate melt at 45-50C, seed at 26-27C and reheat to 28C. Use a thermometer – we tried out a state-of-art infra-red one.
Once you’ve coated the mould, pipe in this filling of
Milk Chocolate Vanilla Ganache
Ingredients
150 ml whipping cream
25g glucose
Vanilla bean, seeds scraped from the pod or 7g vanilla powder – we hear Ugandan is best!
300 g milk chocolate (chopped)
20 g Butter
Method
Combine the cream and glucose in a saucepan, along with the scraped vanilla seeds and even the pod. Bring to a boil. Remove the vanilla pod from the cream. Pour the hot cream mixture over the bowl of chopped milk chocolate and allow to stand for 60 seconds. Using a spatula or whisk, stir the mixture in small vigorous circles from the centre of the bowl gradually working outwards until the mixture emulsifies, blends, into a smooth glossy liquid. The less air in the mix the better.
If necessary place the ganache over a warm water bath, not exceeding 34C, to melt any pieces of chocolate.
Stir the butter in taking care there are no lumps left.
Pour the ganache into a shallow metal baking tray. Spread a thin layer and cover the surface directly with clingfilm. Refrigerate until cool and is of thick but spreadable consistency – for about half an hour. Alternatively the ganache can be left, covered, and cooled at room temperature, and ready to be used at a maximum temperature of 25C.
When the moulds have been painted and coated with tempered chocolate, then pipe in the ganache before sealing with more tempered chocolate and scraping off the excess.
There you have the finished chocolates. Delicious!
home made ganache-filled dark chocolates
We used Belcolade Belgian chocolate and colours from HB Ingredients and moulds from the Home Chocolate Factory.
To book classes at Bake With Maria click here:
Introduction to Chocolate Making
or check out all kinds of wonderful baking and cookery classes on the calendar
Highly recommended.
My lovely class and teacher!
Read more about Bake With Maria here.
[…] Read about my chocolate masterclass here […]