Intriguing new ideas

Clever people, chocolatiers.

I realized yesterday during inventory that I didn’t have enough chocolate transfer sheet patterns to decorate 19 flavors of bonbons, so I went off to my favorite places to shop for transfer sheets. To my horror, I discovered that Chocotransfersheets.com wasn’t offering holiday assortments any more, so I hopped on over to Chef Rubber, and discovered that technology (or at least creativity) marches on. They had “Color Me” chocolate transfer sheets – patterns in black and white, which you could “color in” using whatever colors you liked, by painting them with colored cocoa butter.

I immediately realized that this trick should work for other types of transfer sheets as well, including the ones I already had! So I quickly ordered some colored cocoa butter to try it out.

And, while I was poking around, I found instructions for painting cocoa butter onto acetate sheets to make your own transfer sheets. My goodness! What wonderful ideas.

This, of course, brought up the intriguing possibility of screen printing on the same acetate sheets. I had tried this before, unsuccessfully, but then came across this tutorial, which showed the right way of doing it.

Wow! I had no idea so much could be done for making your own chocolate transfer sheets.

(For those who have been patiently reading along without any idea of what a transfer sheet is, it’s a way of “printing” onto chocolate. Colored cocoa butter is printed onto a sheet of acetate, then melted chocolate is put on the acetate. The cocoa butter melts and fuses with the chocolate, so when the sheet is peeled away, you’re left with a “printed” piece of chocolate. It’s rather like applying a decal. There’s a video on how to use them here – it shows how to use them for chocolate decorations, but I put them on top of bonbons to decorate the top.)

Anyway, that’s the plan for Sunday, but I don’t know if I’ll get to try all those ideas. I have a pretty ambitious slate for this weekend: