Saturday, August 27, 2011

Daring Bakers Challenge - Candylicious!

The August 2011 Daring Bakers’ Challenge was hosted by Lisa of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drive and Mandy of What the Fruitcake?!. These two sugar mavens challenged us to make sinfully delicious candies! This was a special challenge for the Daring Bakers because the good folks at http://www.chocoley.com/ offered an amazing prize for the winner of the most creative and delicious candy!


This challenge was definitely challenging! It taught me I am not a master of candy making or tempering chocolate! I made sponge candy from Wilde in the Kitchen and burnt the first batch. The second tasted great as I also added orange extract but I enrobed it in chocolate that was not tempered correctly as you will see in the photos! I highly recommend the sponge recipe though - it's fun to make and tastes like a Crunchie bar (Canadian readers will know what I'm talking about!).


For chocolates, I made some with caramel in the centre, some with caramel and salted pecans (mmmm) and finally some with a center of fig butter (from Trader Joe's)! The flavours of the fig butter and chocolate melded well together to form a sophisticated and delicious taste. However, I don't think the chocolate tempered perfectly on any of these as they weren't as shiny as I had hoped nor did they have the right "snap". Read this article to find out how to temper chocolate - it certainly brought out my "temper"!!


It was an interesting experience though!


Tempering gone wrong!


Salted Pecan and Caramel Chocolates
Tempering Chocolate is tricky but even when it fails it tastes good!
Edible rice paper butterfly makes everything look pretty.
Fig Butter Chocolates - yum!

10 comments:

  1. Quite the variety you have there! Even though your chocolate may not have tempered correctly at least it tasted good. Mine looked good but didn't taste great, so I'd much rather have it the other way around. Nice job on the challenge!

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  2. Wow! You assembled such fancy chocolates. Those salted pecan and caramel chocolates are just calling my name!

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  3. SO beautiful! I'm in awe of your decorated chocolates...I was lucky to just get mine dipped :)

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  4. good for you! I completed a chocolatier course and I know how tough tempering can be....the salter pecan caramel chocolates look amazing -

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  5. They look gorgeous! The fig butter chocolate sounds so good! What a creative combination of flavors.

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  6. Salted pecan and caramel chocolates look very good.

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  7. Oh wow the salted pecan and caramel looks delicious! They all look great though, and you're right the fails are still good. I always eat mine anyway :)

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  8. Oooh! Lovely candies, that oozing caramel looks very tempting.

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  9. Your chocolates are so artistic, even the one with the streaks seem to have been made on purpose, it's a lovely design :)
    Love the rice paper butterfly, very beautiful!

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  10. All your chocolates look beautiful. Absolutely adore the look of them!

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