Daniel D

Wow I’ve never considered this for some reason! On Instagram I also saw you removed the nozzle piece which I’m going to test out too! Thanks for the tips 😀

I always try to remind myself not to compare everything I do to the people I follow on Instagram (e.g. Melissa Coppel, Andrey Dubovic) because my customers have certainly never seen the likes of their works and probably never will! It’s okay that the people you follow on social media are creating this design, like you said it will be something brand new for your customers!

Both versions look great!

@Kerry Beal fabulous work! I haven’t seen this technique on the pyramid shape before - it works really well!

@gfron1 are the shells on the plain bonbons significantly thinner than the shells on your other painted pieces? That’s the only thing I could think of since you said you didn’t refrigerate and hit the dew point.

With the help of my wife’s superior photo skills (mine are seriously lacking), I finally feel like I have a showroom finish picture to share! The dark bonbons are filled with a dark chocolate coffee ganache and a swirl of vanilla cream white chocolate ganache. The white bonbons are filled with a white chocolate key lime ganache and bottomed with a milk chocolate pecan praline - my version of a key lime pie bonbon! The praline crunch on the key lime pie bonbons were a big hit with many customers since I don’t typically add texture to many of my bonbons.

@Casey H. welcome to EG! I use Cacao Barry as my source for cocoa butter in the EZ Temper and have found it needed to be set to 33.8 for my needs. I’m sure each unit is just slightly different, but I can’t imagine it would need to go below 33. I also found that a slight bit of melting at the top is not an issue. Once I stir it around a bit it is the correct texture/consistency and tempers properly. Just my experience though and I’m sure @Kerry Beal can answer any technical questions about the machine.

These look fantastic, Rob! You mentioned that you’ll begin mixing your own colors into cocoa butter from now on. Do you mind sharing where you sourced your colorants?

After trying to skin them myself several times now, I think I’ll take your advice! I’m too much of a perfectionist and it bothers me when there is a little bit of skin remaining. The local grocery stores where I live don’t sell them with skins removed. I guess I’ll have to find a distributor and buy a bigger batch than I need and freeze them.

I’ve always wondered the best way to skin hazelnuts. I haven’t been successful like chocolatiers I’m seeing on Instagram who get the skins completely removed and place it on top of a bonbon. Any suggestions?

@Kerry Beal did you see that The_ChocolateLab has a set of “stories” today all about your machine? Check it out! https://www.instagram.com/the_chocolatelab

@Pastrypastmidnight I’ve had this same issue as well. At the chocolate shop where I apprenticed this never happened, but at home it would happen somewhat frequently. The only differences I could come up with were environment related: I switched from glass shelves in the fridge to wire shelving and I cooled the house down to 67-68F (I was working at 70-72F before). Both of these seem to have helped, but for some reason I still occasionally get one or two bonbons that like to stick back to the mold after initially crystallizing!

I’ve been following Kriss on Instagram for some time now and I’m fairly certain a portion of his posts are advertisements for products where he has some incentives to post about them. I’m guessing he is deleting comments about competing products on all such posts.

@artiesel I don’t personally know anyone with this machine, but you can check out some of The Chocolate Lab’s Instagram videos where they are using a JKV. Not many pointers about the specific machine, but at least you can see it in action. You may try a direct message to see if he will respond. Can’t hurt!

I would agree with Tri2Cook. Paint yellow line first - because you can see some areas where the color behind the yellow is blueish. I’ve done a bar mold using the spray/scrap method. I sprayed black, scraped away with a chopstick, then backed the areas I scraped in gold. Worked out well!

@pastrygirl I’m pretty used to slow going! Thanks for the examples - very helpful. Maybe I’ll spring for a more expensive 1hp compressor to save me some time during Christmas season.

@pastrygirl did you have to make any modifications at all to the compressor, or is it pretty much plug and play? Would you recommend the compressor if I needed to spray 8-12 molds at a time?

@Jim D. spit balling here, but how thin were the shells where this is happening? Could it have occurred while you were removing the bonbons from the mold? I’ve gotten a little carried away a couple of times when cracking my bonbons out of the molds and found some hairline fractures on a few of them.

Yep, what Kerry said. I learned that same lesson the hard way as well. Deodorized is what you’ll need.

@dhardy123 I’m not sure about your question on candy melts, however, if your goal is to work with couverture in the future I would highly recommend practicing with it. It’s not a problem to practice spraying, molding the shell, and melting the chocolate back down to to use again. This way you get practice with decoration techniques and tempering/molding technique as well. Both will take time to master so why not work on them at the same time? My 2 cents.

@Kerry Beal if I have hardened untempered chocolate, are you saying I dont need to melt out all the crystals (by taking it up to 48C) if I’m using EZ temper silk? I only need to make sure my chocolate is fully melted before bringing it to 33.5?

How thick are your bars? They look pretty thick in these pictures. The thicker the bar the more difficult it is to get a perfect temper. Does your new fridge have wire shelving or solid shelving (eg glass shelves)? If your shelves are solid, the heat may not have a place to escape. Also, do you have any air circulation in your refrigerator? I’d attempt to add a fan to see if increased air circulation helps.

@pastrygirl thanks for the recommendations, I’ll check out those sites. My bars are 3” x 6 1/8”.

I’d like to continue the discussion on this thread. I’m looking to add a little extra to my chocolate bar packaging and slide a sleeve over the poly bag, like in this photo by David Chow. Does anyone have recommendations on who might provide this type of custom packaging?

@Bentley Did you pull these thoughts right out of my brain?! I just ordered the EZ Temper on Monday because I was tired of the fuss of tempering by hand as well. After tempering with MyCryo a few times it makes tempering by hand a real drag. Can’t wait for the machine to arrive next week! And as always, @Kerry Beal is amazing and responded to me within minutes of inquiring. Thanks Kerry, you rock!