When I first started making chocolates as a kid, I used the method I had learned from my Girl Guide leader (which is also the method advanced in many Wilton tutorials, which might be where she learned it). Using a good quality paintbrush, you paint the mold with a layer of chocolate. Once it sets, you paint a second coat, paying particular attention to the areas where you can see light through the chocolate. Then you proceed with filling and capping. This is easy enough and can result in a very thin shell, but it is also very time consuming and depending on how intricate the mold is and how many you're doing, it can be a race against the clock to get the wells painted before your tempered chocolate crystallizes in the bowl.
It wasn't until last week that I tried the third method. It was one that I remember seeing during my chocolatier training. In a video profiling a home-based chocolatier in British Columbia, we watched him pipe the chocolate into his molds. He said it was a cleaner way of working -- and it certainly seemed that way. In essence, he had turned himself into the human equivalent of a depositor (which is used in larger scale production of chocolate).
As for the results, I'm very happy with how these turned out. There are fewer imperfections in the shell (no air bubbles to be seen) and look at that shine! It's like a mirror!
The method we were taught in the professional chocolatier program was to ladle chocolate into the wells of the mold, tap it a few times to release any air bubbles, and then invert it (either over parchment or a large bowl) and tap vigorously before scraping the excess off and leaving the shells to set. Obviously, this is a much quicker method, which is great for production, but it can be tricky to figure out how to hold and manipulate the mold the first few times you do it and it's messy.
The night before I planned to shell my molds, I decorated them with luster dust. Because the luster dust is mixed with alcohol to create an edible "paint," it requires a few hours to fully dry before the mold can be filled.
The next day, armed with 400g of tempered dark chocolate, I filled a piping bag and deposited chocolate into each well of my chosen mold. Easy enough and very clean. I gave it a few taps on the counter to release any air bubbles, flipped it over, and tapped with the handle of my drywall knife as the excess chocolate drained down onto my counter (which had been covered with a piece of waxed paper). Then a quick scrape across the mold to remove the excess chocolate and the shells were ready to set! Easy peasy, right?
While this worked perfectly -- and I do mean perfectly -- my next decision was the wrong one. Since I'm aiming for about 30 boxes of chocolates this year, I had a second mold prepared with the intention of shelling another half mold (each mold has 21 wells). I used my drywall knife to collect the chocolate from the waxed paper, returned it to the piping bag, and tried to shell another 12 wells. Now, the entire time I was doing this, a little voice in my head was saying, "This is a bad idea." But I did it anyway. And the result? I didn't shell my mold. I ended up with solid chocolate pieces. The chocolate had thickened to the point that it wouldn't drain from the wells, no matter how much I tapped. I ended up having to re-temper chocolate to make the additional pieces I needed, but they have no decoration because I didn't have time to paint them and let it set.
Now, despite this hiccup, I definitely would use the piping bag method again. It was cleaner and it was relatively quick. In the future, I would just temper more chocolate or temper it in batches instead of trying to be efficient in the way I described. (Side note: If I had a large melter or even a large bowl of tempered chocolate that the excess was falling into, this wouldn't have been a problem; however, I work in very small quantities.)
I definitely want to mold more pieces in the future as a result!
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