Seize the…chocolate

So the other day I posted on Facebook about my white chocolate seizing.  I looked online to see what to do and discovered that white chocolate is very fussy about temperature (another reason I really don’t like white chocolate).  I already knew that a little vegetable oil or shortening melted with it could possibly save it and I tried that.  Well it did not melt back to a silky smooth pourable consistency but it did become spreadable and I was able to save my Oreo bark.  It was pretty and tasty.  Having triumphed, I moved on to other chocolate melting projects.

I had approximately 6 bags of various chips on hand.  Why?  That seems like an awful lot of chips even for a sugar hound like me.  Blame Publix.  They had buy one, get one free Tollhouse chips so I bought ALOT.

Up first was some peppermint patty type candy.  This seemed simple enough.  It only had 4 ingredients…cream cheese, powdered sugar, peppermint extract and dark chocolate for dipping.  Well, lemme tell you something…any kind of cream cheese concoction will begin to melt the minute the temperature goes down 1 degree.  I rolled the cream cheese “dough” into balls and started dipping them.  They started disintegrating the minute they hit the warm chocolate.  So there I am in my kitchen, flinging chocolate everywhere, trying to get these little balls of goo onto the sheet tray before they slide off the skewer.  I even resorted to taking the balls out of the freezer, dipping them in the chocolate and immediately putting them back in the freezer.  It was a sight and I was cussing up a blue streak.  Needless to say, I still have leftover dough and only made about 24 candies.  They were absolutely delicious but there is no way in Hades I am ever doing that again.  I guess on the upside, the chocolate did not seize at any point….

Yesterday, I made some chocolate dipped pretzel rods.  I melted milk chocolate for this one.  I found some peppermint flavored sprinkles that I used on half.  They looked so festive!  I even drizzled some white chocolate over others and didn’t seize the chocolate one time.  I was on a roll and decided to move onto some butterscotch dipped pretzels and sprinkled with nut topping.  And blam-O!  The butterscotch died.  It never even really melted.  It went from chip state to an unstirrable mess.  I think Tollhouse may just be conspiring against me.  I decided to make due and turn the butterscotch concrete into bark. 

I spread it out, sprinkled on the nuts and added crunched up pretzels.  Considering how irritated I was and how much I hate pretzels, this was the highlight of the project.  I took sheer delight in crushing those pretzels.  By the way, this nut topping is a little salty which was a good contrast to the richness of the butterscotch.  And it’s a lot cheaper than buying nuts and chopping them yourself.  I put the pan in the freezer and waited about 15 minutes.  It had hardened wonderfully and I broke off a little piece to taste.   It was at that point that I realized I AM A GENIUS!  This was some of the best candy I had ever tasted (not to mention made).  Plus the butterscotch was a welcome change from all the chocolate I had been making.

I wish I would have taken pictures of all my goodies.  I wrapped them up in little cellophane bags and packed them into all the cute containers I had been saving.  But I could not take pictures because I found my memory card for my camera outside in the mud…which is such another story.