nothing in particular

After attending the course at Culinaire last month, we bought some dark chocolate buttons from them. These dark chocolate buttons are $17/kg, 70% cocoa..expensive stuff I tell ya.
This chocolate making attempt is for Melon's birthday present, we reckon that mango flavour would be one of the most acceptable ones so we are giving him 8 pcs of chocolates for his 21st birthday. HUAT AR~! Heart shape chocolate mould came from our HK trip, bought it for $5(very cheap compared to heavy duty acrylic moulds that can cost up tp $35 @ PhoonHuat)

It was hard to gauge how much dark chocolates to melt cos we cannot reuse them due to the utensils used. According to Geert, chocolates should be made under very clean environment for long storage purposes, where chefs wear masks, gloves, utensils are sterilized..etc, like in his shop. So to minimize wastage we melted about 250grams of dark chocolate buttons and 120grams of white chocolate buttons(white compound chocolate buttons @ $10/kg , white chocolate buttons are not used cos they cost double! omg) for the filling. We had some tough time trying to melt those buttons cos it was a cold day, raining all day long and K could not find his hair dryer to blow hot air onto the chocolates *urgh*

So in the end, we used the 20seconds in-out oven rule to melt them and this took damn long -.-'. To make things worse, my $38 bucks thermometer decided to die on me at this moment..so i had to use my "basic" instincts to find out when the chocolate is at 30 to 33 degrees celcius as we had to resort to using double boiling(water in the base container and another container above) method to keep the melted chocolates in molten state.

There were some hiccups here and there but we managed to fill up the moulds and shake off the excess to make the chocolate shells.

While the shells are hardening in the fridge, we started making the filling which consists of glucose, yogurt, mango, cream, white compound chocolate.

After the shells have harden and can be removed from the mould easily(else we gotta give the mould together as part of the present -.-') we start piping in the fillings to about 80% full.

After the fillings have more of less harden, we proceed to cover the base of the chocolates. By this time, we were encountering some problems with keeping the chocolates within 30 to 33degrees..so the base was not that smooth and beautiful =( The above pic was after the case has harden.

Chocolates are ready to get knocked out and wrapped in their golden wrappings :D

Can you tell which is wrapped by a girl and which is by a guy?

K insists on including the base cardboard in the plastic bag which I felt cheapen the whole thing but anyway up to him lor~

Last but not least HAPPY 21st BIRTHDAY MELON!