How we make our Chocolate gift boxes

Deciding which chocolates go into our chocolate gift boxes.

Before we put together our boxes of chocolates we must decide which flavours go into them. We sell our chocolate gift boxes both in store and online, however it is in store sales that really help drive the direction as you can pick up peoples reaction in real time, both positive and negative of course, something which sadly cannot be done online. Often the chocolates that people look at excitedly are the most beautiful, and are more popular. It’s very rare we make up a chocolate box and it does not contain a dark chocolate orange, this little Jupiter lookalike chocolate is truly beautiful and is of course one of the tastiest. As a result we will use this as an example with step by step instruction below and a video at the bottom of the page.

How to make hand painted chocolates?

Step 1:

Wash the mold and ensure you polish it with a cloth. Some chocolatiers don’t wash the molds but we have found this doesn’t work for us at all. Handwashing is better than using a dishwasher as it ensure you can remove the remnants of cocoa butter better. Ensure the water is hot and soapy, and then ensure you rinse the mold well at the end.

Step 2:

Melt some cocoa butter to 30 degrees. You cannot go higher than this because you will cause the cocoa butter to bloom. See our blog on how to temper chocolate to learn more about fat bloom, but if you are short on time the gist is that it will have white spots on the surface once it goes above 35 degrees and you will need to re-temper it.

Step 3:

You can now use a variety of methods to paint the mold. I will give three different methods we use below:

1) You can use a toothbrush and flick the cocoa butter at the mold. This method is used for our coffee chocolate selection box on the caramel cappuccinos. It gives a random dotty appearance. Very much a modern art style.

2) The second method involves using a paintbrush to paint more detail, this is time consuming but creates amazing chocolates. On the orange chocolates we create red and yellow dots with the toothbrush method and then after this paint orange first, and then white, with the paintbrush. If the chocolate is not white chocolate you typically want to paint white on as the final coat to help the colours stand out.

3) The last method we use is an air gun. You simply fill up the cylinder with melted cocoa butter and spray the mold to give an extremely even covering and any faded patterns you want to create. We find this works very well on heart molds and our white chocolate passionfruit chocolates are created this way.

Painted Chocolate Mold

Step 4

After this you need to leave your cocoa butter 30 minutes to set properly onto the mold. You can use this time to spend getting your chocolate and fillings ready.

Step 5:

Using tempered chocolate you can now fill your moulds. At this point you can either use a vibrating table to remove any excess bubbles and then empty out the chocolate over the machine or if your chocolate is very runny you can simply knock the chocolate back out over the machine without the vibrating table step.

Step 6:

You should now have a chocolate shell (the part of the chocolate attached to the mold). This now needs to be left for at least 30 minutes, it can be done in a chocolate fridge or at room temperature providing you have good air conditioning to control humidity and temperature well.

Step 7:

You can now fill you chocolate shells with the filing of your choice. We have a selection:

We use:

Caramel to fill our Dark Caramel Hearts

Fondant based filling for our Dark Raspberry Creams

Praline fillings for our Dark Brazier Coffee Chocolates

With the case of our dark chocolate orange chocolates it is a fondant filling with an orange zest flavour. The quickest and easiest way to fill the molds is with piping bags.

Step 8:

After waiting for the fillings to set, and this step is tempting to rush but do not. Then you simply fill the chocolate on the remaining mold to cap your chocolates. If the fillings are not fully set at this stage the chocolate will potentially push the filling then when the chocolate cap sets (chocolate will shrink slightly putting pressure downwards on the filling) and cause the filling to create a hole in the cap.

Step 8

Wait around for another 30 minutes, this is the point when you start the long clean down, and then after this pick up the mold and firmly hit it against the table upside down to get the chocolates out. The better the chocolate are tempered the more easily they will fall out. You may find they fall out the moment you tip the mold upside down, if this looks like it will be the case hold a chopping board underneath the mold to stop chocolates flying everywhere.

Dark Chocolate Orange Creams

We have a video underneath from our Youtube channel to show you the techniques used. Best of luck with your own chocolates!