keychris

Thickness. You only have an extremely thin layer of cocoa butter, it takes very little heat to melt it. You'll need to work out how to transport using insulated containers and ice bricks to keep it all cool! If your room temperature is 30C, your chocolates are going to be extremely close to melting. They'll be soft and won't have that crack that is associated with properly tempered chocolate. If you're not worried about that then no problem, but you put in a lot of work to make beautiful product, so you need to do all you can to keep it in the best possible shape (in my opinion)

If your room temperature is 30C, working with cocoa butter and chocolate is just too hard. I'd say it's approaching impossible. You really need to have a cooler environment to get this stuff to do what you want.

The description on their website is "Milk chocolate with hazelnut filling and chocolatey filling", which is not particularly enlightening. It doesn't matter what that is, pair the praline with a flavour you like!

caramelised sugar is different to a ready to use caramel sauce. If you want to make a nut praline paste, you'll need to caramelise the sugar.

@gap's description is almost word for word exactly how I do it when I need to 😁

when the chocolates get moisture on them from being cold and coming out of the freezer, the moisture will cause the sugar in the chocolate to dissolve into the water, then when the water has evaporated you'll be left with sugar bloom, a white blotchy coating that looks unappealing and changes the texture on the outside of the chocolate. It isn't a problem to eat (it's just sugar) but it's not a great look when you've work so hard to make your chocolates!

You can possibly (at a stretch) call it chocolate, but you can't call it couverture 😛 It's not that it doesn't require tempering, it just can't be tempered. Compound chocolate has had all the cocoa butter removed and replaced with other fats, something like palm oil probably, so if you're using it in your products, don't expect it to perform the same as you would using couverture or "real" chocolate (i.e. a chocolate product that still contains cocoa butter)

Don't cry, it's only chocolate! Is it getting movement as it reheats from 27C to 32C? (Or whatever values that is in Fahrenheit). It could be getting too much movement, which speeds up propagation of the crystals and ... yup, thickens the chocolate. It can be tricky to do if you've never done it before! You can test and see if it's overcrystallised or moisture effected: just heat it back up. If it becomes nice and fluid at 40-45C, it's fine, but if it stays gluggy and thick it's probably cactus and only good for baking now. Allegedly you can do this tempering method in a thermomix too, but I've never been able to in mine, I find the same as what you're finding here: set the temperature for say 50C and the chocolate never reaches that temperature, then because of all the heat in the base it takes hours to cool down!

if you only have a small amount of water, like moisture absorbing in from the air, you get thickening, not seizing

something to store your product in before it goes to the shops - humidity & temperature controlled environment like a wine fridge

I would have at least three melters, otherwise you're limited to only using two types of chocolate at a time.

OK, that's different to how I envisaged it, I thought you would mask off two of the triangles leaving the tiny line, spray, then remove the triangles and the cross, then spray again. It's amazing how she gets such a perfect result! (yours aren't too shabby either )

she doesn't mask off those triangles in every single cavity does she? That would be a crazy amount of work.

you mean you would have spelled it correctly then huh

That shape is amazing! Did you make the mould for it?

I often substitute yoghurt / buttermilk / milk for each other in cake recipes with no ill effects, it really just depends on what I have in the fridge on bake day!

Viscosity should decrease as your particle size gets smaller, iirc

To illustrate @Tri2Cook's point, I always temper my cocoa butter by heating it to 45C, then cooling with plenty of movement (i.e. stirring) to 31C before use.

I did! The gun you pictured is the exact one I have, works great.

I've seen a Krea hotCHOC in action, IMHO it's for spraying cakes. We tried it on moulds and it just was spraying far too much. I definitely wouldn't buy it if you wanted to do moulds, unless someone else on here says they've managed to make it work. We only tried for less than half an hour though!

They look fine on my phone, but you have some great bloom in there 😛 probably because they were a bit thick!

my reason for using the cap is simpler - I spill it everywhere if I don't have the lid on

Try a batch without the chickpeas and see what happens?

I need to see a video of it (hint, hint @Kerry Beal)