Gentleman’€™s Agreements

For my chocolatier course, my final assignment was to create five different centers. I was given specifications on what the centers should be and how they should be finished and decorated. My second center is a flavored nut-based center, piped into a mold. I got a lot of great advice from Chocovision on tempering, so I bumped up the temperature and chose a different tempering setting on my machine this time. What I learned from this exercise is making molded chocolates is really hard.

Next, I decorated the mold with a bit of tempered white chocolate and luster dust, using my finger.

Just to be safe, I checked my temper before ladling the chocolate into the molds. Looks great!

After ladling the tempered chocolate into the mold, I scraped the extra chocolate off the top and let the molds sit for a bit, filled with the tempered chocolate.

Once the chocolate had set up a bit, I turned the molds upside down to drain, forming the shell. I cleaned up the molds as good as possible so the shells would release from the molds once they dried.

For the filling, I mixed store-bought marzipan with Gentleman Jack whiskey. Great combination! I added enough to make the marzipan kind of liquid and then piped it into the dried molds. I filled them a little too much and when I ladled more tempered chocolate on top I noticed that some of the marzipan filling was mixing in – not a good sign.

Once the bottoms were dry, I found that I wasn’t able to get the chocolates to release from the molds. Not a success, but a learning experience anyway! Part of my assignment is to give each confection a name. These are called Gentleman’s Agreements, although they proved to be less than agreeable.