watch your temper

Nine out of ten times a bad temper is not a good thing. Bad tempers do not equal happiness. The same is true when you're tempering chocolate. You've got to ease the chocolate through the tempering process while maintaining a calm temper yourself. Staying cool is totally worth it when you see and taste the end results. My final work of chocolate art made me quite proud. It also made me gain a few pounds, but I've decided that it's nothing to lose my temper over.

The first item on our chocolate agenda was to glue together our chocolate boxes. With chocolate. Hello Willy Wonka. I opted for a triangle shape since everyone else was making the typical round and rectangle designs.

Please don't confuse my wood grain designed box sides with old school fake wood wall panels. They're pure chocolate, I promise.

As our chocolate glue was drying, we began making fillings for our bon bons. One of my group mates made a delicious maple filling and someone else put together a yummy peanut butter one. My other group mate and I decided to make a raspberry cream filling since that is one of our favorite flavors. The cream turned out perfect and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to make. By the way, there is white chocolate in cream fillings. That's right, the fillings we use to put inside of chocolates have chocolate in them. Crazy, right?

Here's the base coat for the bon bons in a plastic mold.

Your choice of fillings can then be piped in or rolled up into a ball and placed inside and pouring more chocolate on top completes the process. After a few minutes in the refrigerator, the chocolates should pop right out of the mold. If your chocolate has been tempered correctly that is. Thankfully, ours came out like a charm.

And the best looking ones were placed immediately into my chocolate box. Along with the molded pieces, we also dipped pieces of orange ganache in chocolate. These were my favorite! Here's an inside view of the varieties I used:

We also worked a little bit with molding chocolate, which is way harder to work with than marzipan or gum paste. I managed to whip up an okay looking rose for my box lid though.

And Chef P whipped up a chocolate bunny for his granddaughter with all of the leftover chocolate.

Greg and I have had a great time eating all of the chocolate and sharing it with friends this week. It really does taste much better than the cheap stuff you can get at the grocery store check out lanes. Another item that makes a difference in the final taste of an item is below. I used one for the first time this week and was very happy with the results. Does anyone know what this is?

I'll show you where it worked it's magic soon. It's not worth losing your temper over.