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What's the difference between a candy coat and tempered chocolate?

8K views 13 replies 6 participants last post by  coup-de-feu 
#1 ·
I am trying to make cake pops. I understand that you bake any cake, crumble it, add a little frosting to help with the rolling of small cake balls, and then put on a stick and dipped.

What I don't understand is:

When I watched a few videos online and saw they dip the balls in candy coating, I was confused if that was tempered chocolate or in fact a special candy-like ingredient. The chefs in the video melt the small pellets/chips and do not temper anything, they just directly dip the balls into the coating. When they dry, there is no blooming that you would normally get from untempered chocolate.

So my question is: What's the difference between Candy Coating and regular chocolate?

Thanks.
 
#2 ·
I don't know what "candy coating" is.  However there is this stuff called bakers chocolate where the fat in has been replaced with coconut fat or some other fat that is hard at room temp so it does not need to be tempered.   A chocolate ganache with butter in it will also be hard when it cools.
 
#3 · (Edited)
I have used candy coat in the past but have always known it as candy melts. They are much easier to use, but are kinda like eating chocolate flavored wax. When melted it can be to thick and looks globby. I thinned it down with a bit of shortening and dipped it twice, to make sure there were no crumbs showing. They were a nightmare but turned out cute.
 
#4 ·
About $5 a lb.

Stay away from that candy dreck, if you can't pronounce the ingredients don't use it!

Seriously though,  Coupe de feu is right.  It's a "melange" of cocoa powder, sugar, and some other kind of fat.  It doesn't need to be tempered, but won't have the snap or mouthfeel of real chocolate either.
 
#5 ·
Thanks for the reply,

So if I make a ganche and add some pure coco butter it can dry hard enough to be a coating for cake pops?

And what is the recipe ratio for cocoa powder, sugar, and fat to make a great shell for the cake pops? Because I really want that candy melts consistency, with shine and no bloom, to cover the cake pops.
 
#8 ·
O.k., look, chocolate is rock hard at room temp, right?  It also contains anywhere from 30% to 60% cocoa butter. Cocoa butter by itself is rock hard at room temp.

If you make a ganache--which is chocolate and cream, it will NEVER harden as hard as chocolate, because ganache is about 50% cream, and cream, at room temp is liquid.  It will also need to be refrigerated, and any products you make with it will need to be refrigerated.

Cocoa butter, not cocoa powder is the "wierd one", the one that needs to be tempered, if you don't get it at exactly 32 C it won't be in temper and will be crumbly and chalky.

There fore, if you add copious amounts of cocoa butter to anything, it will require tempering.

What I want you to do is to go window shopping and look at the packaging of various chocolate products.  "Real" chocolate contains cocoa butter, which melts at around 28 C, body temp is around 36C.  Only cocoa butter will melt in your mouth while still giving a "snap" or crunch, very few other fats or fat blends will do this, and the ones that do, leave your tongue and mouth feeling greasy or wax. Labeling for real chocolate should read:  Cocoa mass (aka cocoa liquor) sugar, vanilla, soy lecethin.  If the first ingredient is sugar, than the product contains over 50% sugar.

See, the cocoa bean naturally contains well over 50% cocoa butter.  The bean roasted and ground fine, is cocoa mass aka cocoa liquor.  Cocoa butter fetches a very high price on the open market, and some companies opt to extract the butter to sell to the  pharmaceuticals and add other vegetable fats to mimic cocoa butter.

If you read the ingredient list for melts or "baker's chocolate",aka "Summer chocolate, aka "glazing chocolate"  the ingredient list will read something like:

Cocoa, sugar, CBR (cocoa butter replacement, coconut fat and or blends) and a bunch of other crap.  It will harden to a decent shell, but will never compare to "real" chocolate.

I'd try and experiment with real chocolate instead of crap.  Tempering is not all that hard to do, and the taste and mouthfeel of real chocolate compared to the crap is like night and day.

I hope this helps...
 
#9 ·
That is some great info FoodPump.  Lots of stuff there that I did not know.   However, if you make a ganache with butter it will be sort of hard when it cools, you can coat with it anyway.  And you are right - tempering looks scary but is pretty easy.

As far as the coating chocolates go, I've been told that paraffin wax is a common additive - yum.  

CDF
 
#10 · (Edited)
Good luck with this project. I hope it works out w/ out having to fail and end up tossing expensive ingredients. Show us your fabulous creation and finished product. Like Bakerella , who is a very successful cake pop maker who uses "crap" aka candy melts as what was mentioned here. Bakerella has books about cake pops that are best sellers and she is not even a chef, hmm, she must be doing something right and not struggling either or working in a dead end pastry job. Looking forward.:) can't wait to see your perfect culinary master piece. :)
 
#11 ·
Why so snarky Prettycake?

Crap is crap, main ingrdients of candy melts are sugar and partially hydroganated vegetable oils (yes this pertains to Wilton's)  In most parts of Canada there is a voluntary ban on hydroganated fats, which will most likely become federally enforced in 2014.  

You use the word "professional" in your title.  Do you know what it means?  A professional is one who works exclusively at his/her trade or profession (professional has the root word profession) and does not earn money from other trades or professions.  Think of a football player turned "professional"
they are not working at other jobs during the off season.  Do you earn your living from baking, or is it a hobby?  Can you earn a living if you give cakes away?

If you want to take me down a peg, adress me personally when you become snarky, otherwise you sound like a adolescent girl in a gym locker room complaining to no one but yourself.  O.K.?
 
#14 · (Edited)
Every food has its time and place.  Knowing what your clientele will expect when and where is the final stage of development for a chef.  Are we to pretend that we eat only the very best most wholesome and perfectly prepared products all the time and accept nothing shy of outstanding?  Only ever have kings of nations had this luxury and even them not all the time.  

In line with much of the pretentious standards I see insisted upon on this site all US solders in the field will throw down their MRE's and eat only fluffy baked potatoes out of the oven 2 minutes ago with a crispy skin intact topped with only the very most deftly executed of mother sauces followed by tempered Belgium chocolate desserts perfumed with Tahitian vanilla marrow.  Meanwhile unicorns and scollops dance on rainbows.

Are we so refined that we've never ever eaten a candy bar from a convience store?  What is a cake-pop anyway?  Would you include one between palette cleansers  on your menu de degestation du haut culture?

Every food has its time and place.  Knowing what your clientele will expect when and where is paramount, is more important than the dish itself.
 
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