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I wish I can say someone gave me a big box of Chocolate for Valentine’s day and I got chocolate overdose from it. But in reality, I’m actually the one that supply all the chocolate to people!

You see, I only make small batches of chocolate here and there in the past two years to practice and learn. It’s difficult to sell small batch of chocolate as flavor variety is not enough to make up a box of chocolate. Since Valentine’s day means chocolate season, I got my act together to put on my thinking hat, thought out a strategy to give the chocolate market a try and push my chocolate making limit.

I don’t think the market here is ready for chocolate with very exotic flavor yet, so I’m trying to stick with some common flavor and probably introduce new unique flavor, and yet stick with the Valentine’s day theme.

Since I don’t have fresh mint in my backyard to infuse mint flavor ganache, I opted for ready made mint candy fondant. The ready center is kind of doughy, but once it’s warm up in the microwave, it can be piped into the chocolate shell. Once set, I can just flatten them with a push of finger.

Making raspberry flavored chocolate is quite labor intensive as each chocolate have to be hand dipped. But before that, I had to make chocolate shells. The shells were made a while back ago but the work that went into it was so time consuming, it still haunt me when I think about making chocolate shells.

The shells do pay off in term of giving the chocolate perfect round shape. The perfectly tempered chocolate also mean a perfect finish like an egg shell.

I know airbrushing color on the round chocolate will be too fine and not that rustic looking, so I gave the brush flickering method a try and it actually work really well!

To me, dark chocolate is the easiest chocolate to work with as you can easily tell if it’s properly tempered or not. But making dark chocolate shell is not that straight forward, it took me 3 attempts to come out with perfect chocolate cups that are not too thin, nor too thick.

This is the first time I work with Milk chocolate, the milk chocolate has very bright sheen when it’s not set. Many pastry chefs said: with experience, you can tell if chocolate is proper tempered or not just by looking at them. I think I started to get what they mean. Properly tempered chocolate should have that oily looking sheen that remind you of motor oil.

Since I have to make many chocolate, with two batches per type, I need to get my kitchen organize and make sure my finished chocolate can be moved around easily. Leaving them on a silpat lined half sheet size pan works really well!

To make sure no white chocolate get tainted  by unwanted color, I separated the dark chocolate into another tray.

Milk chocolate was the last batch I worked on, so they get their own tray.

At the end of my 3.5 days chocolate work, I was some what mentally exhausted, but looking at the trays of chocolate, I can’t help to feel that I really accomplished something.

Taking a closer look at the mint chocolate, they reminded me of fly’s eye.

The half sphere shape is really easy to work with, and the green food safe glitter really pop with the dark chocolate. Of course the tempered dark chocolate is so shiny, I can see myself on them!

I made the pineapple bonbon before, so to me this is quite straight forward. However, the coloring of the pineapple bonbon is not as good as the last time I made them.

The white chocolate doesn’t look as shiny as the other chocolate, I think I didn’t apply enough cocoa butter on the mold.

The gold glitter doesn’t seem to be that prominent on the white chocolate.

The raspberry white chocolate balls are so round and consistent in shape, they just remind me of some sort of alien eggs.

The brush flickered red cocoa butter color really add a nice touch, they just scream “hand made”!

The hazelnut chocolate cups really look rustic and not too intimidating.

I’m glad I didn’t choose to use food processor to chop the toasted hazelnut but hand chopped them. I had better control on how fine the nut pieces should be by doing it manually. I’m also glad that I took time to sieve the chopped nut to get rid of those fine hazelnut powder, once the sieved chopped nut are sprinkle into the cup, they look more clean and natural.

Coloring milk chocolate could be challenging because the brown color can compete with the red spectrum side of the color, and could look too dark with the blue spectrum side of color. I know if I just pain the purple glitter on, the whole piece would just look red brown-yish like a piece of brick. Therefore I decided to do a two tone color by adding some silver into the mix.

Adding the silver do make the milk chocolate more pop because the brown color of milk chocolate doesn’t give enough sheen.

Of all the bon bons I made, the Mint has the best look, it’s shinny like jewel.

The shell of the mint bonbon turned out to be very nice, not too thin nor too thick. The mint center also has nice consistency, too bad I can’t take credit for it as I didn’t make it.

The raspberry white chocolate bonbon doesn’t look that special in term of decoration.

When you cut into the raspberry white chocolate ball, the surprise raspberry jam inside is what makes this bonbon special. I have to say, I did a sloppy job of not making sure the raspberry jam is right in the center of the sphere. Doing as many chocolate as I did, you just have to find some corner to cut otherwise it will consume you and make you sick from lack of sleep and exhaustion.

I still can’t believe the pineapple chocolate doesn’t look as nice as the last time I made them.

The pineapple ganache inside however is much better than last time as I learn that pineapple puree tend to have more moisture, so I reduced the cream and increased the ratio of white chocolate to liquid. The result is a more smooth ganache that doesn’t ooze out.

The hazelnut cup is the easiest to make, but I had to make it as late as possible because the ganache is not enclose in any sort of shell, so they might go stale pretty quickly.

The center of the hazelnut filling is a bit odd looking. It’s not a real ganache in the sense that it’s just melted dark chocolate mixed with hazelnut flavor chocolate spread. I think this combination doesn’t give the filling enough creamy texture, hence it set as if two different ingredient are seperated.

To be honest, the look of the milk chocolate still bother me a bit. Since this is the first time I work with milk chocolate, I guess I can’t complain much as it could be worse.

The passion fruit ganache probably has the best consistency, however, it does feel a bit grainy. I didn’t sieve the passion fruit puree after I cooked it down to concentrate the flavor, I think I better do it next time.

Two weeks before I decide to make chocolate to sell, I manage to find a reasonably priced vendor that sell many variety of candy boxes. Choosing the candy box size was one of the challenges, but once I decided that 15 pieces box is a good size, choosing the design was another challenge. They have more fancy boxes with that size, but the price goes up as you move away from plain design. Therefore, I chose to go with 3 basic design first, after all, I’m just testing out the market, so I better keep the cost of packaging as low as possible.

The easiest way to arrange the bonbons is just arrange them based on design.

After randomly placed the bonbons at different places, I kind of like the randomness of different color, it sort of make you spend more time looking at them, and figure out which is which.

The clear lid box seems to be a good “in your face” kind of presentation, however, since I will put a piece of contact sheet and liner paper, it sort of defeat the purpose to have a clear lid.

I only had one day to market the chocolate box set at work. Luckily many people at work are very supportive of my culinary hobby, so I manage to get 8 order just in one day. I suspect many people will want to get a box once they see them, or tasted the loose pieces I was going to sell, so I packed extra boxes just in case. It didn’t hit me how much bonbons I have made, until I see them in well organized boxes!

Since the clear lid is not a very good choice to use this time, I packed just the gold and red lid. Gold lid seems to be the more popular request, simply because it’s more elegant.

To make sure people know the flavor of chocolate, I enclosed a contact sheet into each chocolate box, the theme is tied to Valentine’s day:

Packing those boxes of chocolate then went to bed at night spelled sign of relief, as it concluded my chocolate making madness, which seem to be exciting when I first started. The chocolate project  turned into really long hours of standing up in the kitchen, staring and stirring chocolate almost every hours all day long to the point that I started to miss my bed, not to mention Oreo probably get upset at me for not playing with him but stay in the kitchen all day long.

So, did I make enough profit for the chocolate? You bet! However, it’s not enough to cover all my equipment and labor cost. For now, I think I’m going to just stick with trying to assess the market, and build my reputation along the way while testing my endurance of how far I can push myself when come to artisan chocolate craft.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 9:52 pm and is filed under Hmm.....Food...... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.