Caramel, Pecans, Chocolate

So, wasn't quite as tricky as I thought. My first forays into chocolate were, while flavorful, a basic disaster. Complete lack of tempering for the chocolate. While the taste was fine, the candies would not hold their shape at room temperature, making transport and packing a mess.

Round two? Reasonable success. I don't own a double boiler, but with careful monitoring I could keep the chocolate from burning. Many pages could be written on the process of controlling the size and distribution of chocolate crystals, but I will sum it up briefly for the milk chocolate variety. Roughly 2/3 of the chocolate should be melted down, then brought up to 110F degrees. Add the rest of the chocolate and cool below 84 degrees. From there, reheat up to 87 or 88 degrees, no more, and attempt to hold it around 85 or 86 degrees until finished working with it. Not having a precise thermometer on hand made this a bit of a challenge, but peeking at the graphic above, a pretty sweet plate of caramel pecan clusters was born.

In this week's batch of caramels, I'm simply pouring caramel over a sheet of pecans and slicing the candies up into squares. First time around, I painstakingly arranged clusters of pecans and ladled caramel over the top. Bit of a waste of time, I felt. The thought occurred to me that, if squares are not quite as appealing for consumption, there's a set of biscuit cutters in my kitchen that would produce a fine set of caramel pecan discs. Perhaps for next week.

Now that I have a good instant read thermometer (that has never seen the inside of a beef roast, don't mix your meat and candy, kids) I'll see about doing a better batch of chocolates. Hopefully they'll disappear from the plate in record times.