Keeping Cocoa Butter Warm?

[kstone2016]

Hi there! My name is Kaitlyn and I am a novice chocolatier. I have been reading through a lot of the forums over the last week since I stumbled across this community, and it has been soooo helpful! 

 

I am looking for recommendations on the best way to keep my colored cocoa butter warm while you are working. I am just doing my chocolates out of my home at the moment and don't have very many orders. I normally do 3 molds of each flavor at most and haven't yet taken the leap into airbrushing. I can't really justify spending a ton on a fancy warming box at this point and I also probably don't have the space for something big anyway.

 

I've seen some people use Excaliber dehydrators. Can anyone tell me their experience with those? I did buy an electric heating pad, but it gets too hot and ruins my temper if I leave the bottles wrapped in that. Do you put the tempered cocoa butter into little ceramic cups, plastic deli cups, or something else?

 

Thanks in advance! Here is a picture of my most recent work for a bit more frame of reference. 🙂

[Kerry Beal]

An Excaliber works well - as does a yogurt maker - but you want to attach the yogurt maker to a dimmer switch so you can turn the temperature down. Something like this. Of course you can also run your heating pad through this too. 

 

 

 

 

[kstone2016]

Thanks! I will have to give that a try. I have a large event coming up where I will be doing about 3 times the amount of chocolates I normally do in one go and it would be so much faster to not have to heat things up over and over again.

[Sara M. Fekete]

On 9/16/2022 at 10:53 AM, kstone2016 said:

 

I am looking for recommendations on the best way to keep my colored cocoa butter warm while you are working. I am just doing my chocolates out of my home at the moment and don't have very many orders. I normally do 3 molds of each flavor at most and haven't yet taken the leap into airbrushing. I can't really justify spending a ton on a fancy warming box at this point and I also probably don't have the space for something big anyway.

I bought a second EZtemper to keep my colored cocoa butter warm- I use small glass bottles (that fit onto the spray gun - which you may decide to purchase)) so there’s room for various colors. I just lower the set temperature post-tempering.  Plus EZtemper does not take up much space.

Before that I used the warming buffet servers (water heated type- very inexpensive - but frustratingly inaccurate re: precise temperature- but if I monitored it closely it would stay within 28-31 degrees usually. Hope that helps.

[kstone2016]

Thanks so much! An EZTemper is definitely on my list but it’s probably going to be quite a while before I have that kind of money 😅