A Polderman

This year I am making 6.5 inch Easter chocolate eggs filled with liquor chocolates. Last year I made the same treats but in chocolate baskets (Picture 1). Love the fruit nad nut eggs you are making !!!! Also the dragons are they cocoa butter shells??

Thanks Smithy for the kind words, I am happy the way the colors and the texture turned out but feel I need to find some assistance in setting technique for transfer sheets with hand dipped squares. I would like them to have a more consistent shaped finish. Possibly my pressure is different with each placement? Also its time consuming so the chocolate seems to get overly seeded in the period of time it takes me to complete the process. @gfron1's wall is pretty cool! have a wall in my kitchen that could use a canvas like that! Maybe I could just adhere acetate sheets to it! LOL

You can use parchment paper for high heat candies such as caramels or toffees or lower temps such as ganache's. Others members may have a different opinion but personally I would use the guitar sheets or a silpat for setting any chocolate that I wanted a glossy shine on my finished product.

How does this the warming tray differ from an electric skillet which has a warm setting?? Do you have a temp read for your minimal setting? Wondering if I am missing something by not having this appliance?

I use parchment paper for slabbing because its inexpensive but when I use guitar sheets I use .005mm acetate and I purchase it from Blick. We have a store in Seattle but they do sell online.

Thanks Teo, I will try the rice bran oil. But yes, the recipe specifically calls for cutting the squares on a "22.5 mm strings on a guitar." But then again if you look at Grewelings professional photos page 424, 425 of chocolate & Confections 2nd ed. and then mine, the sesame and chocolate on his are like they were slice perfectly with no jagged edges. I would think you are correct a guitar string would break the product but I don't have a guitar to test it. I thought about getting a long flat slicing blade PRIOR to making my multi wheel cutter so I will look for one. In the interim, I am going to try to make my version of this recipe as Jim did using a mold to achieve a cleaner and finer end product. Thank you for your advise and opinion, I see you are from Italy. I have fond memories of a the chocolate Laboratory in Montepulciano where I had the largest white chocolate/biscotti/pistachio paste truffle rolled in dark chocolate and chopped pistachios and they were kind enough to email me the ingredient list so I could make it when I returned home, Now I just wish we had pistachios as good as in Italy!

This is in Response to Jim D from a different thread in which he recommended I post my response regarding transfer sheets here. I am testing different methods and you are correct Jim, making your own transfer sheets come with some heart ache! When I used them in my magnet mold I had good turnout. prepared them first by cutting to size then adhering to my acrylic boards, I treat the acetate like a chocolate mold and buff it before painting. Then I will splatter them, sponge them and/or paint them. I do not move them until I am ready to insert them into the mold because I find that moving them causes the cocoabutter to separate from the acetate. I let them cure for over 24 hours prior to use. I also found that when removing product from the magnetic mold it is best to remove the transfer sheet FIRST by gently peeling it from the mold then release the chocolates with tapping because if I release the chocolates first the cocoabutter cracks off the edges of the product and creates irregular product that must be eaten immediately before anyone can see my errors! 🙂 . My final product was pretty good in the sense of little wasted or damaged product. I have a photo but the lighting is not good but you can get a sense of the outcome. Last night I tried the same transfer sheets but cut them into smaller squares and pressed them on the top of my white chocolate tahini squares and that was not nearly as successful as using them in my molds. I have enclosed a photos of those, they are the red and orange painted ones. Several areas on the edges that the cocobutter did not release from the sheet to the chocolate and I am thinking it may be because I did not firmly press them enough while the chocolate was at the proper temperature? I know the cocobutter was not very thick in comparison to my molded green and yellow splattered hearts so I believe it is the application. Another difference was the green hearts I chilled for 15 minutes in the fridge whereas the hand dipped squares I let rest over night. I did a test one hand dipped product in the fridge and it worked well after I pulled it out and rubbed my warm finger on the top of the sheet before removing! SO is it chilling, pressure and warming prior to removing that is key????? If I had more time to spend on this I would but I think I will do better to switch to a square or round bon bon mold then cut my sesame base and adhere it to the bottom of my cocobutter molded chocolates filled with tahini ganache?

Thanks Jim, I am responding to a little of this and that so tell me if I am wrong as I am new to this forum but will repost what is relevant to transfer sheets only to your recommended thread but to you I will post the rest of the conversation. As for making the cutter, It was EASY! I live in the Seattle area and we have a couple of metal shops one is called online metals and they ship too. I bought my steel rod from them 316 stainless and it cost me MORE in toll fess to get it then it did for the steel rod! I purchased pizza wheels from our restaurant supply store and some stainless spacers for $5 dollars each from a specialty hardware store. My husbands cousin came up with the idea to use the pipe clamps to keep them on and the handles are just plastic pipe from home depot plumbing dept. It works very well at cutting my caramels and ganache's.

Thanks Jim for the details on how you worked through the steps and how you made alterations. I wanted to make them originally as a bon bon with colored cocoabutter painted in the mold but the specific mold I wanted has not come into stock yet. I don't have a guitar cutter and didn't even think about the crust being too hard to cut on one! I actually have made my own multi bladed caramel cutter and used that to cut through the ganache layer then used a thin long knife to finish cutting the crust and it came out decent but not as perfect as I would have liked. I didn't follow the recipe exactly because I am changing up the top layer using white chocolate and tahini. The first attempt I made my own tahini as keychris suggested and it turned out but was too overly toasted for my taste so I am using "trader joes" tahini. The label does not specify the sesames to be toasted and it is quite mild in flavor but I think that works better with white chocolate so it is staying in my recipe for now till I have time to try to make my own that is more like that flavor profile I am looking for. I sprinkled smoked Spanish paprika on the crust prior to pouring my white ganache layer then sea salt and more smoked paprika on top of the ganache layer. I am finishing mine by hand dipping them in dark chocolate rather than the partial dip as the recipe calls for and I am decorating with hand painted transfer sheets. We will see how well that turns out??? I haven't placed my hand painted transfer sheets on top of a hand dipped piece before but they have worked well in my magnet molds. It did cross my mind to use acetate sheets but my textured sheets are thicker so I think I will stick with those till I get comfortable with the process as its a bit tricky because time is of the essence and you gotta have a game plan UP FRONT or you wind up retempering chocolate will sesame seeds in it, not fun. As for the rolling out the sesames I am glad to know I am not the only one feeling like I pulverized them!! I switched rolling pins and found the weight of my traditional wooden rolling pin worked better when I rolled lighter breaking the mass rather than crushing it. But like you mentioned it left some larger prices that I had to re-roll. I attached a photo of my home made caramel cutter and a photo of what my undipped sesame tahini pieces look like prior to dipping. They will be finished tomorrow so I can post a photo of the finished pieces later. Thanks again for your advice and its nice to know there are others working through the process.

Hi Jim, SO it sounds like you have prepared Peter Grewelings Tahini Squares recipe? I am curious what you used for your "heavy plastic sheets" to roll the croquant out? I first attempted to use my heavy acrylic boards which happens to be a supply he lists in the front of his book. That didn't work well, finally after retempering my chocolate now with sesames in it!!!! I settled on rolling it between two textured plastic fondant sheets but they measure only 8.5 X 11 and the recipe calls for a finished 12 x 12 inch sq. As it turns out the final size happened to be a nice thickness I cant imagine getting it to roll an additional 4" thinner and my final product depth of that layer looks about the same as in the book????? One thought I had was that my chocolate may need to have a lower viscosity??? Thoughts… advice... and your technique would be appreciated.