Apricot Butter Ganache Chocolates

Apricot Butter Ganache centres
 
Recipe from Chocolates and Confections by Peter Greweling
Notes: I got this book a few months ago and was impressed by all of the scientific explanations of chocolate and candy making. There's very detailed step-by-step instructions about tempering, molding and dipping chocolates, as well as how to make things like candy canes, sponge toffee and marshmallows. For a first attempt, I made a butter ganache which differs from a cream ganache which I've made countless times before.

Apricot Butter Ganache Chocolates
I mixed very soft butter with apricot glaze (instead of the jam in the recipe), then stirred in melted tempered chocolate. My temper must have been off because the ganache certainly did not set up in 20 minutes, so I put it in the fridge to firm up. Adding the precoat was simple, but cutting the slab into squares was messy and time-consuming. I see why professionals use a guitar cutter. To avoid cracking and splitting, I cut the ganache at room temperature but it was very, very soft. I think I may have put too much alcohol in.

Greweling says that when tempering using the seeding method, the mixture doesn't have to be taken down below the working temperature. This didn't work for me, as I got lots of fat bloom on the dipped pieces. Also, I added more cocoa butter to the dipping chocolate during tempering to make a thinner mixture, hoping to achieve a thinner shell. This worked pretty well, and I didn't have any problems with the ganache pieces sticking to my fork. I also didn't tap the fork on the bowl, but used surface tension to remove excess chocolate. The squares were cut too small, so my 2-prong fork couldn't pick up the pieces. For the decoration, there is a critical period for applying the sugar crystals: a minute before, and they sink into the warm chocolate; a minute after, and they won't stick.

There is a lot of discussion in this eGullet thread about recipes from this book.

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