cc.canuck

Just had a disastrous attempt at tempering with it using the seeding method. My initial hope was that I could temper chocolate, dump it in the melter, and it would stay at a useable state long enough for me to get done all the things I need to get done. Really unsure how to incorporate it now...

Hi there! Thought there weren't enough threads about melters here so I should add one! I've recently bought a melter and am playing about with it to see how I can best use it to help me keep my chocolate in a workable state for longer. I know you can use a melter to temper with the seeding method BUT would it be possible to simply melt tempered chocolate up to 31° while stirring like you would using the microwave method? Hope that makes sense!

This is the answer I was hoping for! Looking forward to giving it a go. Thanks for the help.

I'd like to make Greweling's mint fondant recipe as a moulded chocolate. Has anyone had any experience doing something like this? His and similar recipes for fondant w/invertase have you form the fondants and then dip them in chocolate but I want them to go into a a particular bonbon mould that I have. Thanks for any advice!

I am a big fan of Greweling's soft caramel recipe using condensed milk but don't get on with the evaporated milk recipe. I'd like to make coffee caramels using the condensed milk recipe but am wondering if infusing condensed milk with ground coffee and then staining the coffee out will work? I'm imagining it would be a very sticky and difficult process! Anyone done this before?

Hi there. I am considering buying a Mini Meltinchoc to help with some issues I'm having with my process but wanted to get some opinions on it first. I've heard the temperature is inaccurate but that's pretty much it. What I would be using it for is dipping biscuits and caramels. I'm finding that my chocolate is becoming over tempered during the dipping process (quicker with caramels than biscuits because the former have been cooled before dipping) and my attempts to keep it at the correct temperature using a microwave have not been particularly successful. Would the mini meltinchoc help with this issue and make my workflow easier? I'd ideally like to be able to dip at least 40 biscuits or caramels in a session. Thanks for any advice!

I have just done a trial run of posting some of the chocolate biscuits I am planning on selling to myself. Each biscuit was in its own tight-fitting sealed bag and the postal box they were in was padded out with shredded paper. Overall the trial was a success as the biscuits do not seem to have moved around too much. However, I spray (as in flick from a toothbrush not with a spray gun) the biscuits with coloured cocoa butter and there was a transfer of this onto the inside of the bags. Not so much that the look of the biscuits themselves was diminished but enough that the end product wasn't particularly professional looking. I am wondering if at least part of the issue is that I am using biodegradable bags rather than plastic. I am going to do another trial with foil wrapping the biscuits but am interested to hear if anyone else has had any similar experiences with cocoa butter coming off on their packaging. Sorry this post was so long 😂

Nothing helpful to contribute here. I just wanted to congratulate you on your incredibly compelling topic title.

I've treated myself to one of these after admitting my caramel cutting is not quite as perfect as I'd imagined! Kerry, is it easy to add a layer of chocolate on top of your caramel to help with dipping with this contraption would you say?

I haven't been heating my bar moulds and they have been releasing relatively fine. I tend to always have release marks but think I need to just accept that they will always happen for me

Now that the actual products are sorted those are my summer jobs! The bars will probably go into tight fitting bags, dipped items like toffee and caramels in loose bags (though a bit concerned about marking during transport with that), and then biscuits will have to be a box though I'm not yet sure what's going to go in with them to keep them from moving around and marking each other. Even though I'll be using biodegradable bags I don't particularly want to individually wrap all of the biscuits (planning on selling boxes of 6 and 12).

I'm a stay at home mum to a toddler (and part-time CrossFit trainer - odd combo with chocolate making I know but it's a good balance health-wise!) at the moment so my grand plan is part-time for now to build up my skills and experience and then hopefully increase to something more substantial. I want to offer chocolate bars (in trios), dipped caramels, and dipped biscuits and my thinking to start is to have rotating stock each month to help make production more manageable. I feel like I'll be fine with the marketing side of things and am more worried about the logistics of production. Certainly a lot of different skills to gain through this! Very grateful to have this forum as a resource.

Picking this thread back up as I've finally been organised (and restrained) enough to make, dip, store, and test some caramels to see how they fare over time. The idea was to test at 4 weeks, 6 weeks, etc but by 4 weeks the caramels had already crystallised. Any idea what could have gone wrong there? I made the caramels, cut them the next day, and then dipped them the day after that, which I'm sure wasn't ideal.

That makes sense! I'm looking to do bars with inclusions (fruit and nuts, biscuits, toffee) so their shelf-life won't be quite that long but I guess the longer a shelf-life you can achieve the more wiggle room you have.

Thank you that's very useful!