Mother’s Day is my favorite holiday and I assume I am not the only one. No words, no cards, no gifts, and no celebration can express the “thanks” we should show to Moms all over the world. You could buy the most expensive, delectable chocolate truffles packed in attractive packaging or you could present to her some not so perfectly round, uneven sizes of colorful balls that clearly shows the home-made characteristics, and you can be sure that most, if not all, Moms will select the later ones. When accepting the chocolates she will secretly wipe off a teardrop from the corner of her eyes and she will tell you that: “the spices in this kitchen always make my eyes teary”
Today, however, we will create a “perfect” hand-made chocolate with the help of molds. I am going to show you how easy it is to make these beautiful chocolates for your Mom that she will not believe they were not store-bought. The other benefit of this post is, that you can save it and use it as a reference for future use for birthdays, anniversaries and other happy occasions.
You can also look back to the post dated April 19 and review the recipes for hand-made chocolate truffles; those are also very easy to make, they look inviting and their taste is all up to you; why? Because the ingredients that you can use to create them are practically limitless.
I’d like to reiterate that you can always send me a note for recipes, or questions about recipes I published and any other questions you may have. We are not a site like, for instance Northfork.patch.com: where you can see this message:……..”my chef doesn’t like giving out his recipes to the public.”)
First thing you need is: Equipment
- I used a chocolate tempering machine, but it is not necessary, you can temper the chocolate manually. (See the brief note at the end of the post). A more detailed tempering procedure will follow this post. However, if you are interested to learn more about this equipment, I can send you more details; just drop me a note. It is completely controlled by a computerized system; so you do not need to guess if the chocolate is in temper.
Fully Automatic Chocolate Tempering Machine
If you prefer to temper the chocolate manually, you will need a good chocolate thermometer (if you will be working with chocolates more often, it is worth to buy a laser thermometer (not cheap) with infrared laser sighting; it measures surface temperature up to 4 feet away, highly accurate (takes out the guess-work), great in determining if the chocolate is in the right temperature, meaning “tempered”). Alternatively, you could also a digital thermometer with a probe.
Digital Thermometer with a probe
