Now that we had our feet wet a bit we moved onto filled and dipped chocolates. Whether filling or dipping, it is important to make sure that the chocolate shell is even or you make a stress point in the chocolate, which can sadly, lead to mold growing in the filling.

We started with dipped chocolates, which I found out were much more difficult to do than they seem from the outset. In order to make a filled chocolate, you start by making a filling and spreading it onto a sheet pan inside of a frame (so the filling doesn’t spread and has nice crisp edges). Once the filling has set, remove the frame and temper some chocolate. Then cut the filling into the desired shape for the chocolate and place it onto a chocolate fork. Using the fork, dip the filling into the tempered chocolate and set aside.

Although this sounds easy enough, turns out, it is very difficult to try and get a nice outer coating on the fillings, but after 4 hours, we were able to churn out a bunch of these chocolates.

Once we were done with the dipped chocolates, we moved onto filled chocolates.

There are actually 14 steps to making filled chocolates!

1. Shine molds with cotton balls
2. Temper the chocolate that you will be using for the shell of the chocolates
3. Pour chocolate into the mold
4. Bang the mold down on a flat surface to remove any air bubbles
5. Once you start to see the chocolate begin to set ever so slightly, turn the mold upside down over a bowl and keep it upside down to get an even shell.
6. Scrape off the extra chocolate that you can easily see
7. Place the upside down mold into the fridge on a cooling rack (that is on top of a sheet pan to catch the drippings).
8. When you can see the chocolate setting, the mold can be removed from the fridge and all of the extra chocolate should be scraped off with a bench scraper or chef knife
9. Fill the shells with ganache, or another filling of your choice, up to the top of the mold, leaving a space as high as your shell is thick
10. Top off with tempered chocolate
11. Tap the mold on a flat surface once again
12. Scrape the mold of any excess chocolate once again and place an acetate sheet over the whole mold (which will give you a nice, shiny, flat bottom).
13. Place mold in the refrigerator again and allow to set.
14. Once set, remove the mold from the refrigerator, remove the acetate sheet, and bang the mold hard on the table to free chocolates. If you chocolate was tempered properly, the chocolates should free themselves easily because tempered chocolate shrinks when set.

These steps can be used to make any flavor, size, or shape chocolate so we used them to make both small filled chocolates and larger candy bars (shown at the top of the post).