Willy Wonka

I just submitted my entry to our silent auction. I'm committed now towards doing the chocolate thing. It's time to do a little shopping! I'm planning on making these very professional looking by using cocoa butter transfer sheets. Here's what you do: you make your chocolate ganache, let it harden, and then cut it into the size you desire. You then melt chocolate, and retemper it. (Chocolate is tempered with crystals. When you melt it, it goes out of temper, so you need to put the crystals back in with "seed" chocolate. If you don't, you'll get dull, cloudy chocolate that doesn't have a nice snap when you bite into it, and has a tendency to "bloom" on you, which is a cloudy covering, definitely a deal breaker.) Once you have your dipping chocolate retempered, you dip your ganache squares in this, then sluff off the excess and place the dipped chocolates on parchment paper. You can either put a nice design on top, using the dipping fork, or you can use transfer sheets to give them a very professional appearance. Once the chocolate is on the parchment paper, you place a one inch square of the cocoa butter transfer sheet on top, then place an offset spatula on top for a few seconds, then let it set up. Once it's set, you simply pull off the transfer sheet and the design has become a part of the chocolate. Very cool! I'm going to buy some of those to use for the auction.

You can also transfer a 3-D design to the chocolate by placing the dipped chocolate onto a plastic textured sheet. I'll buy a few of those too, I think.

I'll have to get started making the chocolates in the next week or so. My flavors will be the Irish cream one that I came up with, and then I think the other flavors will be dark chocolate and orange, a dark chocolate and raspberry variety, and milk chocolate covered caramels. Those will be the samples I'll have out at the auction, so we'll see what happens!