White Chocolate Love Bars

More hearts for my Valentine's Day assortment...

Stacey's White Chocolate Love Bars Ingredients:
16 oz Chocolates El Rey White Chocolate Discos
64% Guittard Dark Chocolate couverture
1 oz bar mold

I'm using a 16 cavity bar mold that has one ounce bars. I think I got mine from Tomric.com (candy bar mold). First I tempered some dark chocolate for the decorations.

I use the seeding method and a microwave to temper my chocolate. I put my couverture in a pyrex bowland microwave at 30 second intervals, stirring with my favorite rubber spatula (the 1 piece ones are the best), until it's about 100F, using my trusty temperature gun. Then I add my seeding chocolate and stir until it reaches 90F, removing the seed chocolate afterward. The other thing about tempering chocolate is that you can't really make only one or two ounces - you need to do at least 4-5 ounces or it won't come out right. So, I made these while I was making something else. But, you can always keep the chocolate for later and remelt it if you don't use it all. It was also less than 70F in the kitchen and on my working surfaces. Remember, chocolate won't temper successfully if it's too warm. :)

Using a chopstick, I took the tempered dark chocolate and drew hearts in the bottom of the mold:

Here's a better close-up:

And here's one of the whole mold with the decorations:

Then I tempered the white chocolate and used a tablespoon to fill in these molds. White chocolate working temperature is about 86F, but since I'm not coating, but spooning, I started using it once it reached 90F. I spooned it in, jiggling the mold against the counter-top after filling each cavity.

Professional places have a special machine that will perform this agitation, which releases the air bubbles from the chocolates to make a shiny unmarred surface, and it will also keep what will be the bottoms of the chocolates nice and flat.

You can see the bottom left cavity was the last one - the chocolate had started to set and as I poured it in, it didn't smooth out even after agitation. Oh well, it's the bottom. :) All part of the process. Probably would have been easier to use 17 oz of chocolate, then there'd be a little leftover so I wouldn't have to scrape the bottom to fill the last cavity.

After waiting patiently for a few hours, I freed my chocolates. This mold is not polycarbonate, so it's not as stiff and I had to be more gentle. I laid a piece of plastic wrap over the chocolate side of the mold, and then put a baking sheet over it. I then turned both the mold and the baking sheet over to allow the chocolates to fall from their cavities. Some of them required some pressure to release, but if you temper correctly, the chocolate should shrink away from the mold and shouldn't require too much effort. Most of the time, for this shape especially, they just fall right out of the mold when you invert it, so you actually have to be more careful about denting them if they fall out too violently. If it requires a lot of effort, the chocolate is probably not tempered, or the ingredients added changed the structure of it.