This was a record-setting year for chocolatiering: 136 pounds, 2 ounces of bonbons, in 38 different varieties. Alas, one of the varieties would not fit, so the peanut-butter-and-jelly ones did not make it into the boxes (and thus are not listed in the index). But I can assure you they were delicious!

If you’ve ever wondered what 136 pounds of bonbons looks like, wonder no more! Here I am with the complete collection:

Yesterday eight friends came by and helped pack 3,000 chocolates into candy cups and then into boxes, tied the boxes neatly with red ribbon, and packed them away for shipping. There were 83 boxes total – 40 for donors, 41 for friends, family, and a few select business associates, and 2 that I’m holding in reserve should a box or two get lost in the mail.

After that, my friends gleefully pillaged the remaining chocolates (there’s a reason I never have trouble finding volunteers to pack!), with the result that my house is now almost bare of chocolate. Once Mike takes the remaining few pounds to his salivating coworkers today, the house will be empty of chocolate. Except, of course, for the two cases (40 pounds) of chocolate I have left over for next year… 🙂

While Tigress mostly hid from the hordes of people, Fritz was ecstatic about the hordes of people who were clearly invited over just to pet him! Alas, they were mostly busy packing chocolates (how terrible!), but he did find some beautiful cat toys, made just for him.

Apologies for not posting earlier! I have been exhausted from laboring in the chocolate mines. It’s a difficult and dangerous job; first one has to locate a vein of chocolate, then blast out the surrounding rock, then refine the chocolate ore into pure molten chocolate, before it can be put into bonbons. 😉 But I have been persevering, and while the mining company refuses to allow photos in the mines due to the grueling nature of the work, I have some photos of the bonbon-making part of the process to share with you all.

Here’s the beginning of the process: chocolate slag, left over from the day before, and scored into chunks so it can be conveniently remelted. (Cutting up a large chunk of chocolate is rather like trying to carve rock: one needs an icepick and hammer at the very least, and plastic explosives can come in handy for especially large pieces.)

Then one heats about 10 pounds of slag slowly, in a giant glass bowl, in the microwave, until you have a big crucible full of molten chocolate. This step is very dangerous; the rising fumes from the chocolate can be intoxicating, and a single misstep can have dire results. (Imagine trying to clean ten pounds of thick, slippery chocolate off the floor – especially after it hardens!)

Then one (carefully) pours the 10-pound melted chocolate into the giant bowl of the tempering machine, and sets the machine going. Here’s a video of the chocolate tempering:

(If you’re reading by email, you won’t see the embedded video, but you can watch it on YouTube.)

A short explanation of the tempering process:

Chocolate, like all precious metals, is actually composed of tiny crystals. In the case of chocolate, the cocoa butter can harden into five crystal forms, only one of which is stable at room temperature. The others slowly convert to the stable form over a period of hours to days, but it happens very slowly, and since the process is slow, you get large crystals of cocoa butter rather than lots of tiny ones. The result is a streaky, gray appearance, a crumbly texture, and an unpleasantly grainy mouthfeel. Kind of like this:

To avoid ugly, grainy bonbons, you temper the chocolate before using it. In the traditional method, you melt the chocolate until all the crystals are melted, then pour the molten chocolate onto a marble slab and scrapes it around until it begins to thicken. Then you quickly heat it to working temperature (about 88-90 F) to use it. The rapid cooling and scraping on the marble precipitates the formation of lots of small seed crystals; heating it back up to 88-90 degrees melts all the unstable cocoa butter crystals, leaving you only with the stable kinds.

I used to do it this way. It’s complicated, messy, and you can’t do a lot of chocolate with it, because after three or four ten-pound batches, the marble heats up and you can’t use it again until it cools. (Though it is rather fun scraping the chocolate back and forth over the marble slab with a pair of giant drywall tape knives; there’s the pleasure of making a huge mess and then cleaning it up again with a flick of the “knife”.)

The other method is to melt up the chocolate to 130 degrees, then cool it rapidly by dumping in hunks of previously-tempered chocolate. As the tempered chocolate melts, they seed the molten chocolate with the stable crystals, and all is well. The only problem is that one then has hunks of solid chocolate in one’s tempered chocolate, resulting in lumpiness.

Enter the chocolate tempering machine. This groovy gadget has a bowl divided into two parts, with a partition that lets melted chocolate through, while keeping the solid chunks on one side. This allows you to “seed” your chocolate without getting chunks of solid chocolate into your melted chocolate. Here’s a pic of a tempering machine in action:

The molten chocolate stays on the front side, the solid chocolate stays on the back side. The bowl rotates to mix the chocolate, and a thermocouple embedded in the plastic divider senses the temperature, allowing the machine to heat or cool to keep the chocolate at the ideal working temperature.

Now that you’ve got a big bowl of tempered chocolate, you can start dipping your bonbons! Here’s a shot of some MacAllan 12 Scotch whiskey truffles being dipped:

I grab a center from the near side, and dump it into the melted chocolate. Then I dunk it using the dipping fork, and immediately pull it out of the chocolate with the fork, like so:

The center is covered with more melted chocolate than necessary, so I shake the chocolate a little, then tap the dipping fork on the side of the bowl (a little tricky, since the bowl is continuously rotating). Then I scrape off the bottom of the center as I take the chocolate out.

Here’s a pic of me cleaning off the excess chocolate (note the small ribbon of chocolate falling back into the bowl):

Then you slide the bonbon off onto the tray. The chocolate tends to run off the front side, forming a little puddle at the bottom, so to avoid having an unsightly “foot,” you push the bonbon forward ever so slightly as you deposit it. This hides the “foot” under the bonbon.

Here’s a chocolate being deposited onto the tray. In this photo, I’ve actually already pushed the chocolate a bit forward, so no foot is visible.

Once the chocolate is deposited onto the tray, it needs to be decorated. So we typically have two people at a dipping station: one person dips the chocolates, the other puts on the transfer sheets. This are sheets of smooth plastic screen printed with a design (I use Chinese paper-cut animals because I like the look), then hand-painted with subtly sparkly, colored cocoa butter to give a textured, glistening look to the backgrounds. It takes six or seven hours to paint the transfer sheets and another 6-7 hours to hand-cut the sheets, one by one, afterwards – so it is a royal pain but worth every instant, as it produces beautiful chocolates.

Here’s a friend putting on transfer sheets while I dip chocolates:

Applying transfer sheets looks simple but can be a bit of a challenge. To start, you need to apply the transfer sheet as soon after dipping as possible, because the transfer process relies on the heat from the melted chocolate to fuse the cocoa butter design to the chocolate. If you don’t apply it quickly enough, the transfer looks ragged or doesn’t work at all.

Then, you want all four corners clearly visible, so you need to press down evenly, but if you press down too hard, the chocolate on the top slides downward, resulting in an unsightly “foot”. The design also needs to be centered on the chocolate, so careful placement is important too. So, while not as tricky as dipping chocolates, this does require skill and a delicate touch.

You keep doing this until you have an entire tray full of dipped chocolates:

Once the chocolate has hardened sufficiently (several hours to a day depending on room temperature), you peel away the transfer sheets, trim off the colored cocoa butter by running a gloved finger around the edge of each and every bonbon, trim away any “feet”, and put the chocolates away. This takes about half an hour per tray – which doesn’t sound like much, but adds up to 18 hours over the course of making 36 flavors.

And then you’re left with gorgeous, tasty, finished bonbons:

And that’s today’s peek into life in the chocolate mines!

The last two days have been busy! With help from my friend Susan and her daughter Allegra, I’ve been chocolatiering up a storm. Here are just a few of the things we’ve made over the last few days:

But wait, there’s more!

We also finished the lime-ginger-chile-peanut caramels:

…and a few others:

• candied bergamot peel
• candied grapefruit peel with rose geranium syrup (yum!)
• candied citron peel

Here’s a quick pic from behind the scenes: cinnamon honey caramels, being cut on my confectionery guitar:

And the same caramels, cut, dipped, and decorated:

Plus we got started on a bunch of new flavors. Here’s a luscious video of the strawberry rose honey fruit gels, bubbling away:

And here it is, cooling in the frame:

I also got bold and made some pecan, walnut, and sesame giandujas. Giandujas are a mix of nut paste, chocolate, and sugar (the most famous one is Nutella) – I’ve attempted it a few times in the past, with mixed results. But we were running far enough ahead of schedule that I felt I could afford an experiment or two, so we made maple pecan gianduja, cinnamon-walnut gianduja with tiny bits of caramel mixed in, and sesame gianduja with tiny bits of caramel-covered sesame seeds mixed in, and a dusting of cardamom on top. Here are two of the giandujas, poured, hardened, and ready to cut and dip:

And, finally, here are coconut fudge and a thin layer of Concord grape fruit gel. The coconut fudge will get dipped in chocolate with an almond on top (making a very high-class Almond Joy), and the Concord grape fruit gel will get a second layer of peanut butter gianduja poured on top. Yes, that’s right – I’m making a chocolate peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich!

And, finally, another peek behind the scenes. Here is about 8 pounds of  leftover chocolate at the end of the day, poured into a giant sheet pan, scored, and ready to be remelted and used the next day. (I call it “chocolate slag”.)

The “score” so far is 28 pounds, 1 ounce of finished chocolates. Only ~100 pounds to go!

Chocolate season has begun! I kicked it off on Tuesday with green tea/honey fudge and jasmine tea/dark chocolate/walnut fudge. Here’s the green tea/honey fudge in progress – doesn’t it make a fabulous witches’ cauldron?

No eye of newt, however – just matcha powder, honey, sugar, and cream. (Well, I may have thrown in a neighbor’s kid or two. Hopefully nobody will notice!)

And here’s the finished jasmine tea/dark chocolate/walnut fudge…

(I apologize for the somewhat industrial-looking nature of the fudge…giant pans of fudge are delicious but not especially photogenic. Not to worry, pretty pictures coming soon!)

Next up was the lemon lavender white chocolate fudge:

This fudge is actually made with Meyer lemons, which are a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange…it has a fruitier and more floral taste than the Eureka lemon you see in supermarkets, which pairs very nicely with the vanilla flavor in the white chocolate.

I also made some coconut tequila lime fudge:

This one looks different because it hasn’t crystallized yet. Finished fudge is a matrix of very small sugar crystals, which give it its luscious mouthfeel. The way you get those crystals is to heat the syrup to ~240 degrees Fahrenheit, then cool it rapidly to 130 degrees. This creates a supersaturated sugar syrup. Then you agitate the syrup until it crystallizes. This produces lots of small sugar crystals, giving the fudge a smooth mouthfeel. (If you left it to crystallize naturally on its own, it would produce large crystals and a grainy mouthfeel.)

Anyway, once it’s fully crystallized it will become opaque and bright white – and delicious.

I also made two batches of caramels:

This one’s really nice – I used Vietnamese cinnamon from Penzey’s (a wonderful source for fresh spices), which has a bit of a kick to it. So the flavor is intensely cinnamon, a little bit hot, and with a honey finish.

And, finally, I made a batch of salted lavender caramels:

I taste-tested two versions on last year’s coworkers – one batch with fleur de sel (French sea salt) sprinkled over it, and one batch with no salt. Interestingly, while people couldn’t identify what was different between salt and no salt, they preferred the salted version. So, sea salt it is.

The last thing I did was to paint all my chocolate transfer sheets. Those are the decorative designs put on top of every chocolate. Here’s a photo of some finished chocolates from last year:

These designs are made by using chocolate transfer sheets, which are basically decals made of cocoa butter (for those of you old enough to remember decals, that is!). You screen print designs on a sheet of acetate using thickened cocoa butter. Then you dip a center in chocolate, and immediately lay a transfer sheet on top. The still-molten chocolate melts the cocoa butter on the acetate, merging the cocoa butter into the chocolate. Then, after it hardens, you simply peel away the transfer sheet, leaving the design on the chocolate.

I like to have a textured, colored background on my chocolates, so I have the images professional screen printed, and then paint the backgrounds by hand with a contrasting color of cocoa butter. The process looks like this:

And the fully painted transfer sheets look like this:

Notice you can still see the brush strokes – that’s intentional, as I love the slightly textured effect this produces.

This morning, my goal is to make one final batch of fudge, and three more flavors of caramels. In the afternoon, I’ll pull out the chocolate tempering machine, and start making those pans of caramel into some seriously luscious bonbons!

…and, winning in a landslide, this year’s holiday card photo will be:

(It wasn’t even close: something like 90% of people, here and on Facebook, voted for this one!)

For those who were wondering, by the way, yes, the bow, ribbon, and box are all made of white chocolate – Valrhona Ivoire, to be exact. The red and green are colored cocoa butter, as is the yellow lettering. Photography and photo edits were done by my very talented friend and critique partner, Lieven Leroy.

Meanwhile, chocolate season proceeds apace. Earlier this week I trialed a matcha (powdered green tea) white chocolate fudge and a jasmine tea-dark chocolate fudge – both with and without walnuts. Today I started a citron-honey caramel and a passionfruit-ginger-honey-lime caramel:

Tomorrow I’ll cut up the caramels and dip them into tempered chocolate. I will probably try both flavors with both white and dark chocolate, just to see what works better. Normally I use dark chocolate with caramel because caramels are mostly sugar – but the passion fruit caramel is intensely tart, so I think it may do better with white chocolate. Only one way to find out!

The citron-honey caramels, by the way, are made with fresh citron zest, not the tasteless candied citron you find in the grocery store. I came across some Etrog citrons at the farmer’s market yesterday and am happily making a batch of candied citron peel for this year’s chocolate covered citrus peels. I love citrons – the Etrog type look charmingly like yellow footballs, and the Buddha’s Hands are delightfully weird – like a grapefruit crossed with a squid! I neglected to take photos of this batch, but here are some citron photos from the archives:

Tomorrow, after dipping the caramels, I plan to try a green tea/honey fudge with chopped candied ginger bits. I am still toying with the possible flavor combinations. Do I add some white chocolate to the fudge? And if I do, should I add something with a bit of tartness to cut the sweetness? Lemon juice, perhaps, or a touch of lime? Lots of delectable decisions ahead!

Finally, I’ve started working on weaving stuff again, though more in the lines of prep work than actual weaving. I’ve just finished removing a ton of little fuzzy lint balls from my warp, and am re-sleying it so I can troubleshoot a few threads that are not lifting properly. After I’ve finished that, I’ll be able to weave my scarf commission! Hoping to finish it by chocolate season, but definitely by the end of November.

My goal for this week is to trial two or three more flavors, and also to scrub down the kitchen and dining room, which are cluttered and dirty. That’s all I’m likely to accomplish, as I’m flying out on Thursday to go to SOFA Chicago! You can find more details about my talk here; I’ll be speaking on Saturday, November 5, 4:30-5:30 in Room B of Festival Hall, Navy Pier, Chicago, followed by a book signing from 5:30-6:30 at the Schiffer booth. If you’re in the Chicago area, come by and say hi!