November 17, 2018 by Tien Chiu 3 Comments

Presenting the 2018 fall collection

Alas, this is the last collection….the Chocolate Couture House of Tien has now officially closed. My friend Chris Cianci has inherited my equipment, however, and is gleefully planning to continue the tradition. In fact, he did much of the prep work this year, and since I threw out my lower back on the second day of Chocopalooza this year, he and the rest of my intrepid team of volunteers wound up doing most of the work, period. I cooked most of the centers (the flavor-critical parts); they did all the cutting and dipping. And they did a splendid job of it. I can retire from chocolatiering with a clear conscience, knowing the tradition is in good hands.

Here’s the Chocopalooza closing photo with me and Chris. I presented him with a heat-sensitive Star Wars mug when we were done, and poured a liberal dose of hot chocolate into it to make the light sabers come alive.

Use the Force well, young Jedi.

October 13, 2018 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Chocolates for Charity is now closed

All 40 boxes of chocolates have been claimed! Thank you so much for your support over the years.

October 12, 2018 by Tien Chiu 2 Comments

Chocolates for Charity 2018 – final bow!

All the boxes are now claimed! Chocolates for Charity is closed. Thanks for your support over the years.

Yep, it’s that time of year again…with a twist!

The twist is that I’m getting ready to retire from chocolatiering. This year marks 30 years since I started cooking up chocolate bonbons in the kitchen of my college dorm. Since an Imperial ton is only 2,240 pounds (and a metric ton slightly less than that), I think I can safely say that I have made a ton of bonbons in the course of my gloriously excessive career as an amateur chocolatier.

Chocolates for Charity, likewise, has been running since 2003. Your generous sweet teeth have raised over $50,000 over the last 15 years for the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, the American Textile History Museum, the Susan G Komen Foundation, and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. Thank you.

This year, Chris (who’s been one of my chocolate helpers for some years now) and I are teaming up to do Chocolates for Charity. Chris is pretty expert by now, and is thinking about possibly-maybe-perhaps continuing the tradition next year, so he and I are working together and we’re going to do the chocolatiering at his place. We’re splitting the planning and the work 50-50, so he can get an idea of what’s involved, and then he’ll decide whether he wants to carry the tradition forward. (I hope he does! It’s a marvelous tradition and I would hate to see it die out.)

Anyway….this is a long way of saying “Get your chocolates while you can!”

This year’s beneficiary is, again, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. Chocolates this year are $120/box, of which $90 will be tax-deductible. I have 30 boxes available.

(All the boxes have been claimed.)

A few other tidbits:

The chocolates are perishable, as good chocolates are wont to be. Eat them within a week or else put them in the fridge. If you put them in the fridge, my advice is to let the chocolates come to room temperature before eating them; you’ll get better flavor that way. (of course, I have never been disciplined enough to follow this advice, but maybe you have more willpower than I do!)
You can see the chocolates (and flavor lists) for the last few years here:

Tien's chocolates for 2016 — Tien’s chocolates for 2016

A bit about my chocolatiering:

I’ve been chocolatiering for almost 30 years now, making about 90-120 pounds of bonbons every November for friends, family, and Chocolates for Charity donors. I spent one winter training with Richard Donnelly of Donnelly Chocolates (who frequently appears in Top 10 lists of American artisan chocolatiers – the most recent appearance was in National Geographic’s Top 10), so I’m pretty good at chocolatiering now. I’d put my work on par with some of the best artisan chocolatiers – though I don’t have the equipment to do some of the really fancy stuff, you won’t find better chocolates elsewhere. I also do a lot of exotic flavors that you won’t find elsewhere.

I have 30 boxes available this year. I’ll update this post when all the boxes are claimed. (Don’t wait – they’re usually gone within hours!)

December 4, 2017 by Tien Chiu

Presenting the 2017 fall collection

38 flavors in 2017! The new ones are:

Earl Grey tea fudge
maple bourbon caramel
orange caramel
gingerbread orange caramel
Prune, port, cinnamon and honey caramel
Blackberry yuzu
Peanut butter
Sorrento lemon peel

Many thanks to Susan, Edie, and Chris, who helped make the chocolates; my friends Carolyn, Brian, Chris, Edie, Jeremy, Pam, Nyondo, and Danika, who helped pack the chocolates; and to my friend Lieven, who did the photography!

December 4, 2017 by Tien Chiu

118 pounds, 6 ounces

This year’s chocolate harvest was a bumper crop! We made 38 flavors of fudge, caramels, candied citrus peels, and fruit jellies, totaling 118 pounds, 6 ounces. We ran dangerously low on chocolate at the end – was 106 pounds of chocolate going to be enough? – but it turned out fine; in fact, there was a whole 6 pounds left over.

Here are the finished chocolates, neatly boxed up and ready for packing:

And here is a little bit about the process.

These are the prune, port, cinnamon, and honey caramels (delicious!) midway through the dipping process:

For those not familiar with the chocolatiering process, the chocolates on the right have transfer sheets on top of them (the yellow goat on a red background). Transfer sheets are basically edible decals. A sheet of acetate is printed with an image in colored cocoa butter, then placed on top of a freshly dipped chocolate. The warmth of the chocolate coating melts the cocoa butter, which fuses with the melted chocolate. After the chocolate hardens, you can pull off the transfer sheet, leaving the cocoa butter image behind.

You can buy preprinted chocolate transfer sheets, but because I wanted a distinctive look, I had a set of transfer sheets custom printed with Chinese paper-cut animals. This harkens back to an old family tradition. When I was a kid, every year we would screen print our own Chinese New Year cards, in two colors, using a Chinese paper-cut animal from my parents’ collection as the cover of the card. (The animal, of course, always corresponded to the Chinese Zodiac animal whose year it was: a tiger for the Year of the Tiger, a horse for the Year of the Horse, etc.) The printing process was an all-family job: my mom designed the cards and cut the paper to size, my dad printed the cards, and we kids would tear around all over the house laying the printed cards out to dry on the floor. It was a ton of fun, and I like to think that by sending out holiday chocolates with Chinese paper-cut animals on them, I’m continuing the tradition.

Working with the transfer sheets can be challenging, however. As delivered from the manufacturer, the transfer sheets are just one color:

I tried pre-printed two-color transfer sheets in the past, but had trouble getting the image to adhere. So now I hand-paint each transfer sheet with colored cocoa butter:

chocolate transfer sheets partially painted

Cocoa butter contracts as it hardens, so the transfer sheets need to be allowed to harden for a day or two with a weight on top to keep them flat.

After that comes the cutting – one sheet at a time, because the acetate shifts and the cocoa butter backgrounds tend to crack if the sheets get stacked:

chocolate transfer sheets - cut — chocolate transfer sheets – cut

And, finally, the different images need to be separated and stacked, each in its own container, until ready to dip.

This may not sound too awful, but when you consider that I typically use about 120 of any given motif in a batch of chocolates, and that there are 30 different design motifs, that’s a lot of transfer sheets to cut. 3,600 of them, to be exact – each hand-painted and hand-cut, one at a time. (Props to my friend Susan, who does most of the cutting every year.)

Even after all that work, transfer sheets can be tricky. Chocolate is extremely temperature-sensitive, and if the room is too warm, the transfer sheets won’t adhere properly. And the temperature during this year’s chocolate season was abnormally warm. When we started peeling the transfer sheets off the vanilla latte flavor, the room was too hot – about 75 F. The images started peeling away from the chocolates, like this:

chocolate transfer sheets - room too warm — chocolate transfer sheets – room too warm

Bad, bad. Very bad. But what could we do? We needed to clear some trays so we could make more chocolates, but the room wasn’t going to cool down any time soon.

Fortunately, Mike and I have a portable air conditioner in the dining room. We hooked up the air conditioner and pointed it at the baker’s cart where the trays of chocolate are stored. That got the temperature down to 65 degrees. After an hour, we tried peeling off the transfer sheets again – and voila!

I’ve often said that the challenging part of chocolatiering isn’t making the chocolates taste good. Armed with a good recipe, even a novice can make wonderfully good chocolates. The hard part is making them look good – and that can be challenging indeed.

I took a break midway through chocolate season, as usual, to celebrate Thanksgiving at my friend Carolyn’s house. Of course I brought a few chocolates with me:

The maple bourbon caramel and orange caramels on bottom left are my favorite new flavors from this year. The maple bourbon caramel has about 3/4 of a bottle of bourbon whiskey in each batch, plus cream and maple sugar, and is delicious. The orange caramel is made with cream, sugar, a ton of mandarin orange zest, mandarin and navel orange juice, and a small shot of lemon juice to give it a bit more acidity. The result is a marvelously buttery, sweet orange flavor with just enough acid “zing” to keep it from being cloyingly sweet. It tastes like the orange curd (similar to lemon curd) that I used to make in college – one of my favorite confections.

I made 38 flavors this year, expecting to fit in only 37 – but by a miracle of packing and special dispensation from the gods of physics, we managed to fit all 38 flavors into the box. The flavor index will go into a separate blog post, but I’ll leave you with this year’s holiday card. Happy holidays, everyone! May your coming year be beautiful, delicious, and many-flavored.