Chocolate production

Chocolate is actually the candy I love eating. And I can eat a lot of it. At once. Its making is also fun. Just a little annoying, that producing the chocolate isn’t as easy and fast as eating it. Making chocolate is also an activity to do with my Miss A.. We like to experiment with chocolate fillings all the time and make them different every time we make. However, I have collected our favorite chocolate recipes below (pending) as a basic recipes we can come back to if need some inspiration.

Candy for Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabakh

I developed these two recipes for the charity to support the people under blockade in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Apricot and nut balls

500g dried apricots, 450g almond flour, 100g orange juice and 115g coconut butter and blended together. The mass is then rolled into balls. I coated the balls with melted white chocolate (I used around 500g) and rolled them into finely chopped walnuts (around 300g).

Dried plums balls

I blended 400g dried plums, 300g rolled oats and 115g coconut butter together. The plum dough is then rolled into balls and coated first with melted dark chocolate (around 300g) and then cocoa powder.

Both doughs can be frozen down.

Orange and marzipan

100 g marzipan and zest of 1 orange and orange juice are kneaded together. This dough can be rolled into balls and coated with white tempered chocolate. We like to coat it with some orange chocolate as well. We also used this as filling in filled chocolate.

Filled chocolate using molds

Filled chocolates are gorgeous and yummy. But hard to make. The challenge is tempering the chocolate. You can understand the chemistry behind it but still fail. As with everything else, tempering chocolate requires dedication to master. And Miss A. did it. And me as well. As we really wanted those little beautiful treats for our Christmas after-dinner hygge. The whole december last year we had a filled chocolate lab going on. We failed, learned, tried again and then it worked out. The chocolate could come out of the molds and even if there were some unpolished details, never mind. As we think more we try, better we become to it.

In between the failures of chocolate tempering, we played with developing different fillings for the chocolates, truffles and other candy. Chocolate making is fun. Really fun.

Chocolate tempering cheat list

Type of chocolate	Melting temperature	Working temperature
Dark chocolate	50-55 °C	31-32 °C
Milk chocolate	45-50 °C	30-31 °C
White chocolate	45-50 °C	28-29 °C
Ruby chocolate	45-50 °C	28,5-29,5 °C

Apple and cinnamon pure filling

Miss A. came up with an idea to fill the dark chocolate shells with some Christmas flavors. And it was a great idea.

She cooked 300g chopped apples, 80g granulated sugar, 0,5 dl water, a dash of lemon juice and cinnamon in a saucepan for about 7 minutes. Then she blended it, poured into silicon molds and froze them down after they were cooled down.

Cherry jelly filling

I use the 100g liquid from the cherry sauce that is poured over the rice and almond porridge for Christmas dinner and one sheet of gelatin for this jelly. While the gelatin is soaked for 10 minutes in cold water, I warm the cherry sauce up in a saucepan and then melt the gelatin in. Then I pour the warm sauce into a piping bag, let it cool and then it’s ready to be used as filling for the chocolates.