tanya_simone

Oh Kerry thankyou for replying! You are one of the members who always answers problems very well and you appear to be very knowledgeable in alot of areas, and so I'm very much appreciative that you took time to help me out I would mainly use my machine for choccy purposes, but for certain occasions (perhaps 3 or 4 times a year) I do make the odd cake, I can always decorate it without spraying though, i was just curious. Rather be safe than sorry If you think the coloured butters are definitely doable then I will give them a go, no harm in trying right? It just put me off a little because I read a few people saying they had trouble in making it correctly and it took numerous attempts before they got it right. I was actually curious to ask also whether you could add oil based flavourings to chocolate itself, like I have peppermint oil and possibly orange oil, and I wondered if I could blend them with the choc, then if I wanted two flavours I could have the choc shell as mint or whatever and the inside as a different flavour just to experiment a bit? Or is this a bad idea? Was just a thought! Also - ''so I'll use fruit puree, with the addition of freeze dried fruit powder and perhaps a bit of compound flavouring'' <-- yes! This never even occurred to me either, mixing two of the same flavour but in different states/forms. A puree and a powder sounds a fab idea indeed. I have to admit, a couple of the flavours in the fresh fruit fillings I made didn't have the kick I was hoping for, I had to use white chocolate with them so you could actually taste the flavour inside on the more subtle fruits. If I were to add something like a puree or powder to the mix itself also, it might just give it that bit of oomph that it needs. Again thanks for the advice, since I've been on this site I've been overwhelmed (in a good way of course) with the amount of things I can, and want, to make. The possibilities seem endless! I just have to find the time to do it all in! Wish me luck

Hello all! A little introduction : I've been making little handmade chocolates for only a few months now on and off when I get time, I never before read anything about them until a couple of weeks ago, it all just started by accidentally making a batch of fudge wrong (it came out too runny and I didn't want to waste it and realised I could probably pipe it into something) so I decided to cover it in chocolate, so off I popped to the shop to buy a mould and everything started from there. They went down well with friends and family and so I began experimenting with textures and inventing my own flavours, making gooey fillings from fresh fruits and various other ingredients / flavourings. I never knew tempering existed until I posted my sister some chocs 3 weeks ago and they had all bloomed the day after, when she recieved them (I now know all about this having done research on it, I was ignorant to it before because I love cold chocs so I always just kept them in the fridge and was blissfully unaware of *bloom*) So I've had to learn & sort out my tempering and thankfully now have lovely shiny, crisp chocolates. I thought my little creations were super until I came on here a few days ago and saw the gorgeously painted, ultra-shiny perfect ones that other people had made, I was in love! This quickly made me realise I had to step up my game and I was well out of my league! I have read pages upon pages of these forums and tried researched into colouring and air brushing etc but I still have a couple of things I'm unsure of (and would like to double check before I purchase any equipment, I also live in the UK and most of the good stuff I see is in America so don't want to waste time ordering the wrong things!) OK! 1 - The airbrush itself, does it have to be specifically for chocolate making or can you clean it all out and then later use it for spraying icing? Or do you need to buy two different machines / nozzles? 2 - Just to clarify (I'm easily confused!) ANY form of colours for chocolates have to all be oil based, and the icing ones are water based? So only cololoured cocoa butter can be used for the choc spraying and nothing else? I understand you can make your own coloured cocoa butters but they are very tricky to master and can go wrong very easily. 3 - I couldn't understand how everybody was creating things like 'passion fruit flavours' etc, since I try to make all my tastes from scratch when possible, I was baffled. Eventually I read just one line saying something about 'powdered fruit extracts' which blew me away as I didn't even know they existed. If you were adding it to your fillings, how would I add it to the mix without it becoming grainy? I once tried to use Angel Delight (pudding mix) to make banana milkshake flavour chocs while experimenting, the taste was gorgeous (I'm a banana freak) but it was slightly grainy and so it went straight in the bin. Do I need to mix these powdered fruits up with anything before adding to my mix to stop this happening with them? Sorry for the rambling and questions but I'm loving playing around with all this as it's so new and exciting. I admit, I'm one of those people that wants to jump straight in & get testing and trying things out for myself to see what works, but I do love finding out 'how' and 'why' things work too Thankyou very much in advance for any replies, they are greatly appreciated indeed