Chocolate transfer sheets and white cocoa butter problems - please help!

[egypt803]

Hi all

 

I would so appreciate some guidance because I'm driving myself crazy trying to perfect the art of chocolate transfers backed with sprayed white cocoa butter - sometimes they come out perfectly and sometimes they fail and I cannot for the life of me figure out what is the variable that makes them work.

 

So I have home made chocolate bar moulds that I can put printed transfer moulds into the bottom of and I have been spraying the back of the transfers with white cocoa butter to make sure the print is visible on milk chocolate.  The trouble is that once I demould the chocolate bars, quite often the edges are messy (not every time - sometimes they are perfect) and I am left with visible milk chocolate  because the cocoa butter and therefore the image doesn't adhere right to the edge.  Every time I think I have cracked it it goes wrong again and what I thought was making the difference obviously wasn't.

 

I temper the bottles of white cocoa butter by heating them to 45ºc and then putting the bottle in iced water for intervals then shaking vigorously and repeating until the temperature is down to about 26ºc then I try and keep it between 28 and 30.  I check the temper of the cocoa butter before using and it seems fine.  I spray using a spray gun heated (but not too much) with a heat gun.  The sprayed cocoa butter seems to set up fairly quickly.  Then I pour in tempered chocolate at 32ºc to fill the moulds.

 

I have tried increasing and decreasing the temperature of the cocoa butter before it goes in the spray gun, putting the sheets in the fridge before filling with chocolate or not, putting the chocolates in the fridge for varying amounts of times, spraying a thicker and thinner layer of cocoa butter.  Like I say, sometimes they come out perfectly but I don't know why - often half of a batch that (as far as I can tell) has been processed the same will work and half not.

 

Am tearing my hair out and if anybody has any advice as to what might be going wrong or other variables I could try and control I am all ears because I am totally stumped.  I hope this makes sense and I have attached a picture to give you an idea of what my problem is around the edges of the bars.

 

Please help!  Thanks so much in advance.

 

Katherine