Orange Cream Chocolates

I have heard this kind of chocolate center called a "fondant" center, and maybe that's correct, but I don't like it because it sounds like the kind of fondant frosting people put on wedding cakes, which is disgusting (in my opinion). They are also called buttercream centers, which is better but also evokes, to me, a not-very-good frosting. I think a better name is just cream (or crème? if we are feeling French?) centers because that sounds delicious, and these ARE delicious! 

I have never attempted dipping any kind of chocolate except caramels before. (Although Sam's grandma helped me do it with her once, when the kids were very little.) We watched the video on the Gygi site and followed this recipe for our centers. We thought it was very clear to follow and they turned out great!

I will reproduce the recipe here, since links have a way of dying out in a few years.

Cream Centers for chocolates

1 cup heavy cream

½ cup milk

2/3 cup white Karo Syrup

4 ½ cup sugar

¼ tsp salt

2/3 cup Marshmallow Crème

1. Stir all but marshmallow crème in heavy, 6-8 qt. pot. Bring to boil. Cover with lid for 30 seconds to steam down crystals. Continue stirring and cook to 228º F Salt Lake elevation (or 237° F sea level) on a candy thermometer.

2. Remove from heat and pour, without scraping pan, onto marble slab. Let it cool until a flick of your finger into the candy takes a few seconds to recover.

3. Add marshmallow cream and beat with a flat utensil or putty knife until candy begins to lose its gloss—about 10 min. Let candy rest for 1-2 min. Resume beating until candy begins to stiffen and loses its gloss.

4. Divide and flavor as desired, or add flavoring to entire batch at beginning. Shape into walnut-sized balls (make a rope, cut, shape in Pam-sprayed hands), place on Pam-sprayed parchment, and let sit, covered, overnight or for several hours to form thin crust. Dip.

NOTES

To make other flavors: 

Raspberry: process 1/2 cup of freeze-dried raspberries in a blender and sift out seeds using a fine strainer. Beat raspberry powder into the center mixture. 

Orange Cream: 1 ½ teaspoon Boyajian orange oil, and (if desired) zest of one orange, finely chopped. Lemon: 1 ½ teaspoon lemon oil, and zest of lemon, finely chopped. 

The process of making these is interesting. We used a marble slab for cooling and beating the buttercream (the cheese board Sam gave me a couple years ago!) but I read somewhere that you can use any natural stone countertop like granite, too. I think our counters are quartz so maybe that would work? Not sure. Anyway, we happened to have this slab and it worked well.

You just cook the ingredients on the stove and when they get up to the right temperature, you pour the mixture onto the stone. It wants to run off, and did run off for us unless we chased it with our spatulas, but after a minute or two it sets more firmly.

Then you fold it and beat it to cool it. We used my bench scraper and that worked best because it's firm and wide. But a regular metal spatula was okay too.

You work it around, lifting and folding over and over.

And suddenly, it changes from a sticky/stretchy liquid into this beautiful fluffy solid! It's like magic!

Then you just form balls out of it, let them set a bit, and dip them in chocolate!

We used orange extract and orange zest for our first attempt, which was delicious, but we had to use lots of extract and still felt the orange flavor could have been deeper. For our second attempt, we got the orange oil recommended in the recipe, and it was SO good! Much better than the extract. We are excited to try to the lemon and lime oils that came with it, too.

We also made raspberry flavor with some freeze-dried raspberries, and it tasted really good, but our raspberries were quite old and had turned an ugly brownish color. Even with pink food coloring added, it didn't have the best visual appeal. So we are also anxious to try this recipe again with some fresh (freeze-dried) raspberries. The orange was my favorite, though! Next to the caramels, which will always be my VERY favorite kind of chocolates.

Our vast amounts of chocolates! Seems like they should last longer than they do…

So delicious!

Making truffles and chocolate-covered caramels

I thought these chocolate-dipped caramels were the best we'd ever made, but looking at last time, I'm not totally sure—they were pretty beautiful last time too. I don't know why we don't make these more often. Well, of course I know—they are time-consuming, and it's a big project to get everything out and put it away—but for how good they are, it isn't THAT hard. Every once in a while Sam will get me some chocolates from our favorite place in Salt Lake, Hatch Family Chocolates. They are delicious and so expensive. About $50 for a box of twenty-four.

We figured out that we can make the same amount of these chocolate caramels, even if we buy the nice dipping chocolate from Gygi, for about a third of that price. And we can easily make three times the amount for very little more work.

I understand why they charge so much! It is hard work, finicky, done by hand, and you probably have to factor in expensive equipment (a tempering machine is a few hundred dollars even for a small one) and maybe some failed batches. But we still thought, after seeing how well our own chocolates turned out and how good they tasted (just as good as Hatch's…if we do say so ourselves…and maybe, to my taste, even better!) that maybe we could try our hand at selling these at Christmas time or for Valentine's Day. I think the girls could make some good money doing that!

While the taste of our chocolates is great, our dipping technique is a work in progress. We got better as we went along!

Truffles

Caramels

We re-used the chocolate box we got from our Mrs. Cavanaugh's field trip to hold our own chocolates. Daisy made a beautiful little label for it.

We made up a box to give to Abe and my mom (he was living at her house at the time).

They were SO GOOD. I wish we still had some! We also tried our hands at raspberry and orange cream centers, which provided some delicious variety to the box, but I will put those in a different post!

USU chocolate factory field trip

Did you know that USU has a chocolate factory? We certainly did not (it has come into existence since the last time we had a Chocolate Unit…which is nice as several other local chocolate makers have disappeared since then!). It's not really a "factory." More of a "building." But it's part of their food science department and it seems like such a great idea! Students get to learn about chocolate making and then participate in the process from start to finish. And then they sell their finished products (which are very good!). Daisy, aspiring hot chocolate shop owner that she is, would like to attend school there just to work at this place!

There is, in fact, another "bean to bar" chocolate company not far from us (Ritual Chocolate in Heber) but since they decided to be snooty and charge a million dollars for their tours, we will leave them to the foodies who don't want children on their tours anyway, and go back to USU the next time we want to watch chocolate being made!

The USU tours do have a cost also, but they give it back to you as a credit to spend at their chocolate store, so we were happy to pay it! :)

Chocolate wrapper "convader belt," as Gus calls them. The chocolates weren't being wrapped at the moment but we saw a video of when they were.

The student who gave us the tour was so nice. She liked the kids too, because they were interested and asked lots of questions. Too many? Maybe. I tried to rein them in somewhat. This machine in the picture was cool—it was just a table that wobbled very quickly back and forth. The students placed the chocolate molds on it so that the liquid chocolate would settle quickly in the molds and not leave any air bubbles. Good idea!

Cocoa butter

Chocolate that has crystallized past Phase V, and some good examples of fat and sugar bloom

Big mélangers. Yum! The chocolate starts to look so good when it's being mixed in these. 

This is the old conching machine, which they apparently don't use anymore, but we took a picture because  it's cool and because it's named Augustus Gloop. Incidentally, when we named Gus, I was worried because I was afraid everyone would only associate his name with Augustus Gloop, which of course isn't a very good association. But now I don't worry so much. He is Gus the Good and no one can think otherwise.

Here he is making a very strange face, though. Why?

We got to do a chocolate tasting as part of the tour and it was really fun. The tour guide was so encouraging and validated every person's tasting experience, telling them there was "no wrong answer" to the "what does this taste like to you" question. She gave us a little wheel to help us describe the flavors (something like this), showing "fruity," "caramelly," "nutty," and so forth. It was interesting. My friend Tye helped us with something similar when she did a chocolate tasting with us.

Goldie contemplates the flavors she is experiencing

We chose some good things to try at the store (little bars of chocolate from different origins, for example). Here we are anxiously awaiting our hot chocolate and frozen hot chocolate.

And here we are trying them! Daisy looks disapproving, no doubt because they have to be shared among so many. :) Anyway, it was a great field trip, well worth the drive! We'd like to go back with Sam sometime!

And here is Ziggy with the chocolate factory he made when we got home…standing next to the shaking table that helps level off the bars in the chocolate molds.

Chocolate Tempering Activity

Tempering chocolate is one of those things that seems hard until you learn about it, and then it seems easy, and then it seems hard again the more you learn about it. (Sourdough bread is the same way.) Keeping your chocolate in temper is fairly simple on the face of it, and yet when you're dipping chocolates, sometimes it is delicate and gets out of temper for no discernible reason, even though it seems like you should easily be able to get it perfect every time. 

Anyway, we learned all about tempering chocolate, why it works the way it does and the underlying chemical processes. And then we tempered (and un-tempered) a bunch of chocolate and dipped things in it. Yum! Even though it all tastes good, you really do miss that textural snap when the chocolate is properly in temper (Phase V crystal formation).

And here is the link to our previous unit's chocolate tempering day!

Ooh, look how shiny these pretzels are. Perfect. 

A lovely assortment of dipped items

Out of temper, in temper

Out of temper (fat bloom)

A beautiful white chocolate dipped strawberry

Junie's bunny strawberry!

Gus's strawberry