Hand-dipped chocolates

I know I've been neglecting my blog lately. With temperatures rising, introduction of new social mediums (Google, please integrate blogger to G+), new toys at home (Google, please create a blogger iPad app), and feeling that my proverbial plate is overflowing and thus stressing me out, sometimes culinary therapy just doesn't cut it. I'd like you all to believe that I'm some sort of domestic diva, but sadly I have a life that extends far past the kitchen. Most of the time I'll gladly answer to anyone's "back to the kitchen, woman!" but lately I've preferred crawling back into bed.

This brings me to an interesting point. Where did the stereotype of depressed women eating chocolates in bed come from? So technically chocolate has polyphenols that inhibit the oxidation of LDL cholesterol, i.e. it can lower the risk of a heart attack. Hmm, that can't be it. According to a scientific study, researches argued that "we want chocolate in times of stress, anxiety, pain and so on. Chocolate is a natural analgesic, or pain killer." Sweet... who needs Advil?

So whats better than chocolate? Chocolate covered in chocolate with an added boost of fat and caffeine: coffee flavored chocolate truffles. Braving the heat, (and being prohibited from turning on the oven) I decided to make some truffles. Correction, I decided to make some hand-dipped chocolates, which are a lot more sophisticated looking than truffles. Like I've mentioned n times before, there are lots of baking ingredients and tools you can find in France that you can't find in the states (without costing you a small fortune). When in school, we used 'cadres' or ganache frames to create our dipped chocolates. We poured the runny ganache into the frames and then cut them with a chocolate guitar. And no, I'm not talking about one of these, but rather one of these. Since I wasn't going to be shelling out $2k+ for one of those contraptions, I figured I could just pour my ganache into a mold and then slice it up. For the life of me, I couldn't find a frame, so I decided to macgyver one. All I had on hand was a rice krispies box. Hmm.

After a bit of cutting, I had something that sort of resembled a chocolate ganache frame.

And here it is ready to go.

So the next part was actually a lot more simple.. make the ganache. My ganache consisted of two types of Ghirardelli chocolate, cream, coffee, and a little nutella.

Once the cream came to a boil, I poured it over the chocolate and then stired the melted chocolate until smooth.

I then poured the ganache into the homemade frame and left it to set overnight in the fridge.

Day two of chocolate making, I pulled the ganache out of the fridge and sliced it into squares. Originally I tried using fishing line to slice through the ganache, as the guitar would, but found the line to be far too weak.

This made for messy ganache squares. I wasn't too pleased, but given my lack of equipment, and working with chocolate in the middle of summer, I just shrugged and carried on. Next up was tempering the chocolate. As I've mentioned before, working with chocolate can be really tricky. In order to achieve enrobing chocolate that will solidify upon cooling, you need to melt the chocolate to a certain temperature, cool it to a certain temperature to crystallize the chocolate , and then maintain it at a certain temperature whilst you're working with it. These temperatures are dependent on the type of chocolate you're using, or precisely, the amount of cocoa butter.

White chocolate melts at around 36-38 degrees Celsius, crystallizes at 23-25 degrees Celsius, and should be worked with between 27-28 degrees Celsius. Milk chocolate melts at around 40-45 degrees Celsius, crystallizes at 24-25 degrees Celsius, and should be worked with between 29-30 degrees Celsius. Dark chocolate melts at around 45-50 degrees Celsius, crystallizes at 26-27 degrees Celsius, and should be worked with between 31-32 degrees Celsius. For those of you who'd like to know what those temperatures are in Fahrenheit? Well too bad... I'm a metric girl when it comes to baking, so go Google it or something. It is really important to respect these temperatures, unless you're aiming for globs of melty goo that wont set.

Making chocolate is a lot of work, and most times I don't think people appreciate how much work goes into them (especially since commercial chocolates are made on huge machines). However, the benefit of hand-dipping chocolates for 3 hours is that afterwards you can't stand the smell of them. I think I might have tried one... for quality control purposes.