Jim D.

@teonzo, thanks for all of those intriguing ideas for the project. I will definitely give the ganache a try, though I expect the chocolate taste will muddy the apple flavor. Can you explain what you mean by "candied apples"? I am very conscious of the sweetness of so many fillings and do everything I can to minimize it. I make pâte de fruit with Pomona's pectin, allowing for less sugar, and I substitute sorbitol for some of the sugar; I also use lemon juice liberally (assuming the fruit allows for it). But there is no question PdF is sweet. I would like to mold the apple pie bonbon in dark chocolate, but someone who has tried this reports that it overwhelms the apple taste, and I am sure that is true. I am definitely looking for some texture in the apple part of the filling, and that is why I plan to grind the dried apple and apple juice mixture carefully, leaving some apple pieces (which, of course, must be small enough to pass through a piping bag). Using the dried fruit adds flavor and also helps with the Aw reading. I'm considering adding some apple brandy/calvados, but don't have any on hand to try at the moment (sometimes I find that fruit brandies don't help with flavor, meaning their flavor is far from the fruit itself--I think this is true of framboise, for example).

The Granny Smith apples are exactly what I ended up buying (though from a different source). Whether for a pâte de fruit or a ganache, I think I will need to remove the skins. One reviewer said they are rather tough, and they probably would not grind up enough (I make most of my PdF fillings by combining purée and dried fruit, cooking them slightly to soften, then grind them to the desired consistency). Of the two choices (PdF or ganache), I am fairly sure the former would end up with more apple flavor. If I made a "water ganache," replacing cream with apple juice, I would get an unacceptable Aw reading. As I continued to experiment yesterday, the PdF turned out to have a really apple-y flavor. Of course, adding the usual apple pie spices helps a lot to create the illusion of eating apple pie, and the crust (cookie) I will include should add even more. I plan to make the shells from Callebaut Gold, which I have not yet tasted but have on order, and it gets high praise from Kirsten Tibballs of Savour (I know, she is a Cacao Barry rep). If the Gold taste overwhelms, I'll switch to Valrhona's Opalys.

Are you making a solid chocolate piece or making shells to be filled? If the former, then I would caution you about something I learned recently: a solid piece needs to be thin for people to eat it safely. Thick crystallized dark chocolate can be threatening to teeth! If, on the other hand, you are making a filled bonbon, I use Tri2Cook's method of calculating the amount of chocolate needed. For shells, you will be dumping most of the chocolate out but will still need enough to fill the cavities before they are emptied. I also add a little more to the weight to take care of the chocolate that lands between cavities. Another complicating factor: Are you dumping the chocolate back into a bowl/melter (whatever you are using to melt it)? If so, you will need less chocolate because you will be reusing some of it for a subsequent mold. Then the calculation becomes more complex. I think that using and reusing a single mold for multiple chocolates will turn out to be much more trouble than you can stand (washing the mold, probably retempering the chocolate).

Interesting idea, but what kind of chocolate would you use for the ganache? In the past I have found that any chocolate (less so with white, but still...) masks the flavor, and apple is such a delicate flavor.

Excellent idea. I suspect your tagging of her may get her attention.

I know this thread is not about sourcing dried fruit, but it's the only one I could find that at least was on the topic. I'm working on an "apple pie" filling for a bonbon (the subject was first mentioned on this thread on using caramelized white chocolate). In the recipe on that thread using apple compote, the water activity level was too high for a bonbon meant to be stored for a while. So I am trying to use an apple pâte de fruit layer (plus maybe a thin caramel layer and a crispy cookie buried in caramelized white chocolate to simulate the pie crust). I got some concentrated frozen apple juice, which had a really great apple flavor, but I wanted some texture, so got some dried apples at the supermarket to add to the undiluted juice (this is just an experiment so far). The juice works well, but the dried apples had virtually no taste at all. So all that brings me to ask about sources for really good dried fruits. I know the subject has been discussed in many threads, but I don't know whether the sources recommended still exist and/or are still high in quality. I note that nuts.com has freeze-dried apples and wonder if anyone has tried those and whether freeze-dried is noticeably better than just dried. Any recent information would be very helpful.

For those who are interested in Andrey Dubovik's famous "eye" technique of decorating, he himself has now posted a video on Instagram. The video is brief but shows it clearly...except perhaps for the hours and hours of practice it takes to perfect it (speaking from experience).

Thanks for the helpful list. Just a rough guess: about how many recipes for chocolates does it contain? For someone who doesn't make the other things listed, how useful is it beyond Greweling et al.?

I thought I would report back. I made the apple filling. I didn't have a liquor with apple flavoring in the house, but used vodka so as to get the effect on Aw of adding liquor. It is not a good time of year (at least in the northern hemisphere) to get flavorful apples, so this was not a taste test. I cooked the apples as much as I could to get rid of all the water I could. The Aw reading was 0.91, which, of course, is high. Jean-Pierre Wybauw writes that a ganache above 0.85 lasts for 3 weeks maximum, but I doubt that he was really envisioning a reading above 0.9 as being that safe. I think I'll try a pâte de fruit using apple purée and dried apples (maybe some fresh as well, but dried usually have a stronger flavor--and obviously less liquid). It's possible to keep some texture to the fruit so as to enhance the sensation of eating apple pie.

I am familiar with the Morato book but have not actually seen it. Is it primarily technique or recipes, or a mixture?

@julie99nl, thanks very much for the recipe. It does sound delicious. My followup question was going to be on the shelf life, but you have dealt with that issue. My guess is that the water content is fairly high. Peter Greweling uses "apple compote" in some of his recipes and describes how to make it (which is what your recipe calls for, plus heating the applesauce in the oven until it is as dry as possible--that might help some with Aw). I am already thinking about what might be done to lower the water content. Maybe some invert sugar could be added (but I notice the recipe calls for no sugar beyond what is in the apples and liquor, so that might make it too sweet). For other fruits I have experimented with making a pâte de fruit using Pomona's pectin, which allows the fruit flavor to be more assertive because of the short cooking time required and also requires adding sugar, which will help with shelf life. Unfortunately these ideas will end up masking some of the delicate apple flavor. I do have an excellent French apple "essence" (distilled from the fruit itself) that might help with the flavor. All this is certainly worth more thought. Thanks again for sharing the recipe.

That is the recipe to which I referred a few posts back--it's why I bought the Cacao Barry. Who am I to question a Melissa recipe, but I found the apricot flavor subdued, and the jasmine tea taste absent. Her use of apricot is what made me think of pairing, for example, an apricot pâte de fruit with a layer of caramelized white.

That sounds really good. Do you mind describing how you made the apple compote?

Interesting, the combination of Dulcey and Earl Grey. Greweling's Earl Grey recipe calls for milk chocolate, and I have always thought the Earl Grey flavor was almost overwhelmed by the milk. I'll give Dulcey and also the caramelized white a try. I envy jmacnaughtan's access to fresh bergamot.

I think you have forgotten that once upon a time you were aghast that I was not a big fan of Dulcey. I think it has a chemical-y taste (I know, heresy). I do like the one you pointed me to, Valrhona's Orelys, and I now use it in my chocolate chip cookie truffle. The Cacao Barry caramelized white is much more subtle than Dulcey.

I purchased a bag of Cacao Barry's Zephyr Caramel (so, caramelized white chocolate) for a Melissa Coppel recipe and would now like to use it as a filling for other chocolates, probably pairing it with a second layer. It strikes me that it might work well with a fruit layer (perhaps something subtle like apricot?), but probably not so well with a milk or dark chocolate layer that would overwhelm the white. I wonder about using it with lavender. Any ideas on how to use it would be welcome.

As was stated recently in another thread, Greweling's Chocolates & Confections is highly recommended. He doesn't have as many recipes for bonbon fillings as Notter or Wybauw (though I use Greweling recipes in nearly every batch I make), and it is true that Notter has a great deal of information on theory and technique, most people consider Greweling the expert on those subjects. If you want to know why something went wrong, he is the source. The same applies when you want to start developing your own fillings.

All of the Savour materials are available all the time, so you could easily view the videos at once and print out all the recipes (it isn't a "course" in the sense of Andrey). In my opinion, however, I think it is primarily in the decoration of bonbons that Kirsten Tibballs (of Savour) has the most to offer. I enjoy her videos a lot and she is a wonderful teacher (her recent video on the "feathering" technique, which is referred to on this forum as "dendrites," is presented in such a clear way that I was able to follow it the first time I tried). But if it is chiefly recipes that you need at this point (as opposed to decoration of bonbons), then I would go an entirely different direction and purchase some books from Peter Greweling, Ewald Notter, and Jean-Pierre Wybauw. You don't really need videos to make a ganache. Once you see what the authors I listed have to say and develop your own offerings, then you could take a more advanced look at decorating techniques with Andrey Dubovik (I didn't find most of his recipes for fillings useful).

Andrey deals a great deal with translucent colors, and he explains when white needs to be used to back a decoration. Some of your work looks like things he teaches. Kerry may be referring to the items that are not mentioned in the list of what is needed--some special sponges, for instance, as well as foam blocks, wooden sticks, etc. Many of them came as a surprise to me, but with Amazon only two days away, of course, I got most of them. He calls for some special molds, but you can get by without having all of them. The half-spheres you use are what he uses most of the time. My overall reaction to the course has changed a bit after some months have passed. There are some lessons that I found useless (those dreadful matcha truffles being the most prominent example), and some that I did not find useful at the time but have used since with success. His real "showpieces" are wonderful (the "outer space" ones, for instance), and I use them, or variations of them, a lot. His most famous technique, the "eye" effect, has eluded me. I managed to get it right a few times, but not consistently enough to use it in actual production, but I intend to keep trying. One thing I must compliment you about: you have the shine on your bonbons that Andrey stresses all the time (he likes to show off by photographing them reflecting him waving his arms in the background). So, all in all, I am very glad I took the course, though I wish I could have told him which of his designs I wanted to learn and so skipped a few of them (in contrast to a site like Savour, where one can pick and choose what to watch). I am getting responses to my decorations that I never got from customers "before Andrey."

As virtually everyone on this forum will say: The "bible" is Peter Greweling's Chocolates and Confections. I also like Ewald Notter's The Art of the Chocolatier for its useful recipes. And Wybauw's book has the most recipes of anyone.

An interesting theory. In support of the fact that we can't know what crystals are actually present, I had another puzzling experience recently: Again I was using the Delta machine but wasn't paying attention to the level of chocolate remaining in the bowl. After it sank below the level of the thermometer that controls the heat, I noticed that the shells were taking longer to crystallize. I checked the temp of the chocolate in the bowl, and it was well over 100F/38C. I was certain that the finished product would be a disaster. But such was not the case--the finished chocolates released without incident and there was no sign of untempered chocolate. If I were just beginning to work with chocolate, I might foolishly ask, "How can this be?" -- but by now I know better than to expect definitive answers.

I'm using a Chocovision Delta tempering machine. I raise the temp, then stir as it increases, so insofar as I can judge, the temp is more or less uniform in the bowl. There is a noticeable difference in viscosity of the chocolate after a short time at the higher temperature.

When tempered chocolate starts thickening as it is used, the first remedy usually suggested is to raise the temperature a bit (but not too high so as to melt the Type V crystals). The next remedy I try is to raise the temp above the melting point of Type V for a while to melt some of those excess crystals, then lower it back to working temp. My question is why the first remedy works. It is not melting crystals, so what is it actually doing that thins out the chocolate? Thanks for any insights.

In case anyone else needs gram information (how many grams a piece made in the mold will weigh--which is, in my opinion, a ridiculous way to identify molds, I think volume would make more sense--but it is the way things are) Amazon doesn't include that info, but I checked and each cavity makes an 8g piece.

@sbain, I like that recipe very much. I add more lemon and extra mint. I like the mold very much. Can you identify it (manufacturer, mold no.)? And, for my final "like," I like the colors you chose for decoration, reflecting what's inside. I try to do that whenever possible, but then that would eliminate blue entirely, so I am not strict about it.