Question:Chocolate Paste (for Cake Decorations)

[katiecake]

Please can anyone help me about making the chocolate paste? I've successfully made the recipe into both white & dark chocolate, but when I repeat the exact same technique for milk chocolate I end up with a pliable chocolate paste that also has some small white chocolate coloured lumps in it - as if there's cocoa butter in it that's solidified into lumps.

I've tried removing as much liquid cocoa butter from the mix (by patting it with a paper towel when the chocolate & glucose are mixed) but it still doesn't work!! All the chocolates I'm using are the same make of good quality 'proper' chocolate so I don't know what else I could be doing wrong??

Does anyone else experience this? Or have any tips to help solve the problem?

Thanks,katie

[duonyte]

Have you tried using a different brand of chocolate? I've never made this - sounds great for decorating - but am wondering if a different brand might avoid the problem.

[Dee514]

I think the (brand of) milk chocolate you are using is what is causing the problem. Even though it is the same "good" brand as the dark and white chocolates you are using, it may have more cocoa butter and/or milk fat than some other brands of milk chocolate.
Is it possible that you are not kneading it long enough to break up the little white blobs?

[katiecake]

We tried kneading it longer, and going back to it to knead again before it solidifies, but it didnt help.

I've looked into the cocoa butter content, it's 29.5% for white chocolate, 23% for milk and 12% for dark - since milk doesn't have the highest cocoa butter content then the cocoa butter content then this theory doesn't seem to correlate? This brand is deZaan (was Schokinag).

If I were to purchase Barry Callebaut chocolate, then their milk chocolate asctually contains 1% more cocoa butte, so based on the cocoa butter theory it wouldnt help.

If it was a matter of just popping to the supermarket to buy some chocolate I would have tried a different brand anyway, but I need to use wholesale suppliers (so that I can reproduce it for cake decorating) - these prands arent available in supermarkets so I'd need to purchase 10kg bags which gets rather expensive.

I had also wondered if it could be the milk used in milk choclate, but when I check the specifications the same amount is also present in the white chocolate.....

So, I think it's a matter of figuring out how to work round it rather then trying different brands?