1 hour ago, quiet1 said:Is there anything smallish that would be useful that I should maybe put on my Christmas wish list?
A good digital thermometer with a probe you can hang off the side of the bowl. Chocolate mold of some kind if you're going to experiment with tempering. (Unless you're only planning on hand-dipping chocolates?) I always used the clear plastic chocolate molds, not the colored plastic ones. After filling the molds with tempered chocolate, I could see thru the plastic molds to check how the chocolate was doing. The chocolate pulls away from the mold as it cools and sets. That gives you a clue when you can unmold.
Homemade chocolate peanut butter cups are better than anything store-bought, but more challenging than making simple chocolate shapes from a mold. There are molds that are a tray of little cups for making peanut butter cups or other filled chocolates.
Oh, and make sure you have a good scraper to get the chocolate sludge off your bowls and the kitchen counter. You don't want to waste any of this stuff--chocolate's expensive. The scraped up sludge could be another batch of tempered chocolate on another day.
