Chocolate.
It’s a treat for all seasons, especially the season of love.
But when it comes time to find treats for your loved ones this Valentine’s Day — or Easter or Mother’s Day or Christmas — shouldn’t you take it to the next level by making your own chocolate treats?
Imagine it: Handmade chocolates lovingly crafted, cutely packaged and happily delivered by you.
When you’re done, you’ll end up with a meaningful gift, instead of a box of bonbons made by a stranger or a faceless factory machine.
“It’s an inexpensive way to make an expensive gift for someone you love,” said Cindy Goetz of Marysville, who has learned to make her own chocolates and other confections at Dawn’s Candy and Cake in Lynnwood. “It’s just an awesome, awesome thing.”
Goetz, under the tutelage of store owner and craft guru Dawn Motes, has made everything from simple solid chocolates done in molds to elaborate and elegant truffles — all at a fraction of the cost of buying them.
She delights in the thousands of mold designs (more than 8,000 at Motes’ shop alone) ranging from tiny hearts with floral imprints to 3-foot-tall 3D bunnies.
Themes include every iconic holiday as well as baby, wedding, floral, animal, insect, sports and patriotic motifs.
“It’s fun, and it’s so easy, even kids come in and have fun,” said Sundee Jacobson of Marysville, another cake and candy student and a volunteer at the shop.
Redmond youngster Matthew Schramm took a recent Chocolate 101 class at Dawn’s Candy and Cake and used the opportunity to fashion favors for his closest friends.
“I’m making spiders for my Spiderman birthday party,” he said as his mother, Katie, watched over him.
Using a plastic bottle filled with molten chocolate, he squirted red chocolate for the bodies and blue chocolate for the legs before popping the mold in the freezer.
Wait, wait, we know what you’re thinking.
Blue chocolate? Red?
Colored chocolate, of course, is simply dyed white chocolate, which lacks cocoa, but is otherwise similar to regular chocolate.
In this particular case, Schramm and his classmates made their treats with compound chocolate.
Compound chocolate — also known as beginner’s chocolate, melting chocolate, bark or confectioner’s coating — comes in white, milk, dark and dyed varieties.
It is less expensive and easier to use than real chocolate because it doesn’t require tempering.
Tempering — a complicated process of melting, cooling and warming chocolate — is typically required when working with regular chocolate or premium melting chocolate (also known as couverture), both of which contain cocoa butter.
Without proper tempering, cocoa butter crystals can rise to the surface as a dusty beige residue, making the chocolate look old or spoiled, a dreaded state known as bloom.
Compound chocolate is just like regular chocolate except that cocoa butter has been replaced with vegetable oil (typically palm kernel oil) so that beginning dippers and molders can skip the tempering process altogether.
It still tastes like real chocolate and is pretty satisfying, too, but you’ll notice it’s not quite as rich and creamy without that cocoa butter.
Chocolate expert Hermina Ehrlich of Seattle, who teaches regularly at Dawn’s Candy and Cake, recommends compound chocolate for inexperienced candy makers. That’s how she started five years ago.
“I learned how to handle the molds with the compound chocolate and that got me hooked. It’s very creative,” Ehrlich said. “Tempering is another whole layer of technicality and most people really don’t care. If you’re not a science-oriented person, it can be very daunting. It’s like making a souffle.”
When Ehrlich, a landscape architect by trade, doesn’t have time to temper her own chocolate, she adds flavored oils to compound chocolate.
“You could add a little bit of lemon oil,” Ehrlich said. “Orange oil is really good with dark chocolate.”
You can also punch up your compound chocolate bonbons with rich fillings — such as peanut butter, caramel or ganache — and your love ones likely won’t know the difference.
Motes said new candy makers should be wary of cheap chocolate, compound or regular.
“Some of them are awful,” she said of some low-grade compound chocolate. “Some of them taste like wax.”
Motes and her staff have taste-tested nearly every version of beginner’s chocolate, but they ultimately settled on chocolates from Guittard, a California-based chocolatier that produces compound as well as premium chocolate.
Another way to skip tempering is to make chocolates that don’t require perfectly smooth exteriors.
Ehrlich, for example, teaches classes on hand-rolled truffles. Though the ganache fillings are made with melted real chocolate pieces, they are mixed in with heavy cream and flavorings, rolled into a ball and then covered with cocoa powder or nuts (and therefore don’t need to be tempered).
If you’re a true chocolate snob and want to go all out with the richest, creamiest, cocoa-butteriest stuff for all types of candy, you can take tempering classes and open the door to a world of amazing chocolate varieties from the all over the world.
High-end chocolate is sweeping the nation the way gourmet coffee drinks did 10 years ago, said Bill Fredericks, an oceanographer and chocolate expert.
Fredericks, also known as “The Chocolate Man,” lives in Lake Forest Park and teaches classes at Dawn’s Candy and Cake and elsewhere in his spare time.
“Chocolate is becoming the new thing,” Fredericks said. “A lot more people are coming into premium cooking these days.”
Remember, even if your candies don’t end up looking picture perfect, you can always eat them yourself or pretty them up in cute boxes and bags.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s ugly,” Ehrlich said. “It’s still good to eat.”
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