Tempering Chocolate: Boy Scout Candy Molds

At the tail end of my husband's service as a Scoutmaster (although, never fear, he's Scout Committee Chairman now; we shall never be free), I was at the local BSA supply store and saw these boy scout candy molds while he was buying merit badges for the upcoming Court of Honor.

Refreshments, anyone? Why would anyone attend these things otherwise? Is an embroidered patch really considered incentive?

Anyway, I've never tried working with candy molds before and just figured you could melt chocolate chips or something and pour them in.

Wrong. Of course it's so much more complicated. Most things are. (That is, until I learned about candy melts. See the "Chocolate-covered Strawberries" post.)

HOW TO TEMPER CHOCOLATE
Working with real chocolate requires tempering (here are Ghirardelli's chocolate tempering instructions). Too bad my thermometer broke, so I was kinda flying by the seat of my pants. But here are the steps I followed, essentially:

1. Buy bar chocolate. Apparently there's something in chocolate chips that makes them not right for this sort of process. I bought pieces of broken slab chocolate from the Winco bulk bins.

2. Chop up chocolate. Here's what mine looked like:

3. Melt 2/3 chocolate in double boiler. Remove from heat and stir in the rest to melt.

4. If you're smart, measure the temperature of the chocolate and follow directions. [I skipped this part.] 

5. Pour chocolate into molds and refrigerate to set. If you do it right, the chocolate is supposed to set beauifully with a nice snap when you bite or break it. Unfortunately, while mine looked really pretty, they didn't set very well and were melty to the touch and fairly soft even after being chilled. Maybe I needed to let them sit in the fridge longer, but we couldn't miss the Court of Honor, now could we?


6. THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP: Forget about this whole process and buy microwavable chocolate candy melts. Eeeeeeasy.