Chef offers guidelines to making Easter chocolate treats

Want to try your hand at making chocolate candies for Easter on Sunday? The easiest way, especially for beginning candy-makers, is to go to a local craft store, or Tempting Treasures by Jan at 30 S. Water St. in Henderson, and buy “melting wafers” or “candy melts.” They contain palm kernel or other oils and can be easily melted in a double boiler or microwave and then poured into plastic molds, also available at these stores.

If you’d rather use regular chocolate, the melting and molding process is a little more complicated, according to Stephen Sullivan, executive pastry chef at the Westgate, because the chocolate had to be tempered.

He said regular chocolate (he suggests Valrhona, which he’s found at Cost Plus World Market), contains cocoa butter, which melts at body temperature; “that’s why it melts in your mouth and gives that creamy feel. Where it gets a little complicated is there’s lots of crystals in the fat, and when they solidify, they all kind of do their own thing.”

Two of the crystals create the desirable shiny, hard surface, he said; the tempering process promotes the environment for those to replicate.

“It takes time, it takes the proper temperature and it takes movement,” he said.

To temper chocolate at home, he suggests using the “seeding” method, which he uses at Westgate. It requires a digital thermometer and an immersion blender.

Sullivan suggests dark chocolate, which he said melts more slowly. Reserve one fifth of the chocolate and chop it into small pieces (the “seeds”); heat the chocolate to 110 degrees, “and you have a clean slate.” Don’t allow water to get into the chocolate, because that will cause it to seize.

At 110 degrees, it’s time to start stirring and cooling the chocolate slightly, to 94 degrees (86 to 88 degrees for milk chocolate, 84 to 86 for white). Add the chopped chocolate, using the immersion blender to combine it.

“You want at that point to make sure you still have some of the ‘seeds’ in there,” Sullivan said. “If they’re not all melted off, they’re going to start the chain reaction to create the beta crystals.

“The immersion blender creates the movement.

The temperature’s going down and the crystals are dispersing.”

Melted at 94 degrees, it can be poured into molds. Sullivan said chocolate conducts heat; if you’re using a large-volume mold, it can actually increase in temperature. To counteract that, he suggets putting it in the refrigerator for about 15 minutes, at which point you should be able to unmold it cleanly.

He also has advice on when — and when not — to use colored chocolate.

“I’d recommend to use the natural color of the chocolate,” he said, with maybe a combination of dark, milk and white. “You achieve more of a European classic look.”