For some reason, I decided that I wanted to make chocolates this year to give out to friends and co-workers. I've done some small experiments over the past couple of years with molded chocolates. They turned out reasonably well. But what I really wanted to do was to use chocolate transfer sheets to create designs on the tops of the chocolates. Transfer sheets are essentially colored chocolate printed onto acetate in a particular design. When you put melted chocolate on the transfer sheet, it transfers from the sheet to the chocolate.
Next up was to decide on flavors. I got the idea of doing different flavors representing different parts of the world. I brainstormed with some people to come up with the following list:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pVD2fWJVXvHmhdP2RUVo3MQ
So now I'm testing the difficult recipes in preparation for the final production. The first difficult one was "Green Tea". I went to an Asian grocery store and got powdered green tea. Here's a picture of how they turned out:
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And I must say, they taste great. I was worried that I put in too much powdered green tea, but the outside of the white chocolate blends nicely with the filling. It's excellent.
I think my next test will be the Brazillian - passion fruit and guava. I can't decide if I should make a white chocolate based filling like I did with the green tea or whether I should try a fondant filling.
