Making your own chocolate candies and chocolate-dipped treats is a great way to make your party or event extra special. Making your own candies will allow you to have personalized chocolates that will fit in with the theme of your event perfectly. Having the candies personalized will take your event to the next level and impress all of your guests. It is easy to get started making your own chocolate candies, even for someone who has zero experience. Once you have mastered the basics of making simpler items like molded shapes, you can move on to more complicated items like multiple colors and even truffles.
Chocolate Dipped
Dipping food items in melted chocolate can make some very tasty treats. Some things that are commonly dipped are pretzels, fruits, and nuts. Feel free to get creative and try dipping lots of different things in chocolate, you might be surprised at the tasty ideas you come up with. The basic idea is to melt your chocolate down in a double boiler. Start with chopped up pieces of chocolate, or chocolate chips. Keep stirring until all the chocolate is melted. Then you can dip whatever you want into the melted chocolate. After dipping, put your treats onto a cookie sheet lined with waxed paper. Then put them in the refrigerator for a short time until the chocolate re-solidifies. With advanced techniques you can use different colored chocolates, and even make your treats into little sculptures.
Chocolate Candies
Using chocolate molds, you can make all sorts of different shapes of chocolate. Some molds even come with little slots to put paper sticks in so you can make chocolate lollypops. You can get almost any shape of chocolate molds that you can think of. Leaf and pumpkin shapes would be great for a Thanksgiving get-together. Tree shapes for Christmas, egg shapes for Easter, the possibilities are really endless. To make chocolate candies using molds, you first want to melt your chocolate in the same way you would for dipping. Then, once the chocolate is melted, you spoon it into the molds. Then you leave the molds in the refrigerator for a short time until the chocolate hardens, and after that you can pop the candies out of the molds. If you want to get fancier, you can use different color chocolates to fill in some of the lines on the molds. You can get even more detailed with this if you use a small piping bag to squirt the chocolate into the lines. Once you get the hang of molding, you can use special molds to make chocolate candies with filling like caramel, chocolate ganache, peanut butter, or whatever you can dream up.
