Mexican Tasting Bars

Experimenting with ways of presenting origin chocolate for tasting. These are 5g bars. 

Pleased with the shine created by the mould and the effect of the transfer.

Fancy one with a nice single origin coffee? 

Now you're talking :)

I'm happy with this mould - the mirror shine is excellent.
Planning to order four more to increase the batch.

The transfer is good but its sugar base is discernible to a sensitive palate. Nevertheless useful as a way to tell chocolates apart from one another.

The Mistakes...

Despite all the advice I have benefited from, my first attempt at these tasting bars involved me believing that I somehow have a super ability to temper less than half a kilo of chocolate. Well... let me share the outcome of my delusional moment: if you're piping chocolate that's one thing. But if you're trying to fill moulds, however shallow they are, FORGET IT!!!

1. Attempting to temper too small an amount of chocolate.
Needless to say, it wouldn't set!

3. The chocolate was too cool and too thick, setting on contact. This made it impossible to 'run off' the chocolate and make a nice finish.

2. Adding some more callets to try to recover by seeding
the chocolate

4. The outcome... lots of bubbles and missing corners, uneven finish and a transfer that has not 'transferred'.

The good thing with chocolate is... you can melt it back down and start all over again - in this case adding a further 350g. So no waste other than precious time and energy spent feeling annoyed at ones own stupid nuances. 

Second time around, the transfer sheet works beautifully, leaving little to clean off the mould afterwards.








The photographs, as ever, make the work so beautiful thanks to my talented 13-year old daughter.