I’ve been into chocolate bark recently. It is easy and delicious. Basically the pizza of chocolate confections, add on any toppings on a whim. Bark can be made with multiple layers of different chocolate with inclusions in between the layers, like crispy chips, cookie bits, or dabs of caramel. Use whatever surplus or leftover ingredients you have. Or go super-food crazy, like me: I’ve been making and devouring 100% chocolate topped with nuts, seeds, dried fruit, and dried flowers.
Just because it looks cool, I like to put patterns on the bottom of my bark. Here’s an easy way using texture sheets. I’m not sure where I learned this technique, it could have been from Kirsten Tibball’s online chocolatier school.
Texture sheets are sold in a wide variety of styles for confectioners. People especially like to use them for decorating fancy cakes. Yes, they are made of plastic and that sucks, but you can use them over and over (unlike cocoa butter transfer sheets).
Tempered chocolate will pick up the texture of any surface it crystalizes against. By simply spreading tempered chocolate on a texture sheet, you will achieve a pattern on the chocolate. (Using diffraction grading film will give your chocolate rainbows - so cool!)
Patterns created this way are pretty when they catch the light, but don’t stand out. A trick to creating a very noticeable, contrasting color pattern is to spread a different color of chocolate onto the texture sheet first. For example, spoon a small amount of tempered white chocolate onto a texture sheet and quickly fill the grooves in the pattern and scrape off the excess before it hardens. (Working efficiently is key here. You may find the chocolate hardening before it is scraped off. No problem, it will still be delicious.) Then spread the tempered milk or dark chocolate layer of your bark. I’ve found that there’s no need to wait in between these steps.
As long as you are using a contrasting color chocolate, why not use a complementary flavor, too? A ginger-white chocolate with a dark chocolate or a pale pink cherry chocolate with a milk chocolate are just two of a billion delicious options.
This is easy, but it can be even easier. Recently, I’ve been using flavored cocoa butter seed instead of chocolate. This is the pure cocoa butter, liquid seed I keep in an incubator for easy tempering. It is already tempered and hardens quickly, of course, and has a cream color that is a beautiful contrast to my dark chocolate bark. Adding some spices to the seed gives it a bit of flavor. My favorite is the cardamom, which gives a very subtle cardamom lilt to the finished chocolate bark.
Another way I like to use the texture sheets is to cut them into about a 1.25 square size to lay on top of freshly hand-dipped bonbons. It works great and much less plastic waste than using cocoa butter pattern transfer sheets. I’ll write a future post about that technique.
Reminder:
Come see me at Hawaiian Sanctuary in Pāhoa this Thursday May 25, 2023, 9:15 am -noon. I’ll be talking about tiny cacao fermentations and home chocolate making for their Plant Aloha Permaculture Education Series. Bring your questions and your homemade chocolate!