Last night I was watching a seasonal baking competition on Food Network. One of the competitors decided to make a candy bar for the first challenge and I was surprised to see he chose a square silicone mold that I own. I bought it several years ago thinking it would be the perfect size for a chocolate bar.
I hear you: Great minds think alike (and fools seldom differ). Which are we? It's hard to say, but it was the kick in the pants I needed to actually test out the mold.
And so this week for my chocolate study, I started by making a simple vanilla sugar cookie. I found a recipe in my small batch baking book that said it holds its shape well and doesn't spread. I mixed it up, cut four square cookies that should fit perfectly inside the mold, and popped them into the oven. And of course, as I should have predicted, when I checked on them, they had spread to giant squares of bubbling cookie lava. I pulled them out of the oven and recut them (removing about a 5mm perimeter from each), and popped them onto a rack to cool.
Next I tempered 200 grams of dark chocolate. I poured about 50 grams into each of four wells and then brushed the chocolate up the sides of each. After tapping it on the counter a few times to ensure that any air bubbles had risen to the surface, I popped the silicone mold on a cookie sheet and tossed it in the fridge for 15 minutes to set.
Then I grabbed some gianduja that was left from another chocolate adventure and heated it gently until it became fluid again, stirring well. I poured 15 grams into each well, then added a cookie to each, and topped them with another 15 grams of gianduja each. I was careful to spread the gianduja so that it completely covered the bottom of the cookies and popped everything in the fridge to set.
Finally, I tempered 250 grams of dark chocolate to cap my bars and poured it over the set gianduja. And you guessed it: back in the fridge for 15 minutes!
This is a chonky hazelnut cookie bar.
I like the size of the mold for a square bar (here cut in half diagonally). One big advantage is that you could pour a bar thin enough that it could be mailed in a slot box to anywhere! But the mold is also deep enough to allow for some layering of fillings -- which is great if shipping isn't a consideration. It would also work well for individual-sized chocolate bark instead of pouring the larger slab and snapping it into pieces.
While I didn't quite nail the temper on the shelling of the mold (I rushed it -- my mind was somewhere else and the chocolate sensed it), the flavours are great together. The chocolate is probably a little too thick, but I don't know anyone who ever said no to more chocolate. The cookie adds a nice texture between the creamy gianduja layers.
Frankly, these are very moreish.
And since we'll soon hit that time of the year when all chocolate production ceases due to high temperatures (there's no AC in my apartment), it was nice to test out something new (or a variation on a theme, as it were).
Have I mentioned how much I love gianduja?
Impressive!
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