Making chocolate candy bars is not an easy or cheap task. It can be a time-consuming and tedious process. But chocolate made from scratch, without the added waxes and unnecessary flavors, is worth the extra work.
You can take a short cut when making your chocolate candy bars, but it will not live up to the real things.
Melting Chocolate into Bars
Ingredients You Will Need:
Milk chocolate morsels
Candy bar molds
Wrappers
If you want to make personalized candy bars with little or no fuss, melt mini chocolate morsels or purchase chocolate that is specialty formulated for melting. Order custom-made molds and have your own name added the bar. Or make small bars and wrap them in fun, personalized wrappers you made yourself. This type of chocolate candy bars work perfectly in chocolate gift baskets for gift giving to friends and family.
If you have the money and the time, try making chocolate candy bars by hand.
Making Chocolate Candy Bars from Scratch
The first thing you'll need is cacao beans. After the cacao beans have fermented, they will need to be laid out in the sun to dry. Once they dry, it's up to you to clean the beans and then roast them. Or, you can purchase roasted cacao beans and eliminate these first few steps.
You now need to shell the beans. This is not as hard as it might seem. While some shells might be reluctant, most will peel off quite easily, leaving behind a bit of chocolate or nib. There isn't much inside one bean, but once you've done a few pounds of beans, the nibs will begin to add up.
Grinding the cacao beans will produce a thick mixture that is not quite chocolate, but brings you closer to the final product. Grinding can be accomplished with a juicer or a specialized chocolate grinder. The texture of the chocolate will be very gritty at this stage.
Once the chocolate has been cleaned of all debris and shells, what is left is chocolate liqueur and pulp. Refining the chocolate means adding items such as milk, cocoa butter, sugar, lecithin and other flavors and ingredients such as nuts.
At this stage, the chocolate must undergo a process called conching. When chocolate is conched, it is put into a specialized machine that agitates the chocolate for anywhere from 12 hours to several days. This process eliminates most of the raw chocolate grit.
If you're lucky, the conching will be successful and you can move on to the tempering stage. Tempering restructures the texture of the chocolate and gives it a glossy finish. Tempering is also the stage where chocolate bloom is generally eliminated. Chocolate bloom is the white/grey discoloration that is sometimes found on chocolate. While the discoloration does not change the taste of the chocolate, it ruins the look.
When chocolate is tempered, it's heated in a double boiler. It's very important that water does not come into contact with the chocolate or it will clump and be ruined. After the chocolate has melted, you still need to work it on a marble slab, which is another lengthy process.
Melt the chocolate one final time and pour it into candy bar molds. Wrap the candy with foil wrapping papers or custom-made wrappers and let everyone sample your own custom made chocolate bars.
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Do you love homemade candy but find yourself intimidated by the process? Whether you're new at candy making or an old pro with a few flaws, these tips will help you achieve candy making success. |
