With a myriad of shell-molded chocolates available from multiple sources in most towns—they certainly are popular—why go to the bother of making your own for a mignardise plate? For the challenge? To increase your personal skill set? Quality control? Flavor? Personalization? Customization? To kill an hour or two? To snack on the rejects? Satisfaction? Kudos? Illegal fillings? Unusual flavor combinations? Bragging rights? For me, the best answer is probably “satisfaction.” It feels good to present my guests something that I have made myself from scratch, but that they usually buy from a store.

Shell-molded chocolates, in case it’s not clear, are filled chocolates with a hard, tempered chocolate shell and a filling that ranges from liquid to solid. Shell-molded chocolates are a specialty item that challenges even professional pastry chefs. Having all the special tools and knowing all the secret handshakes helps, but it also takes skill and practice to fashion high-quality filled chocolates. Although I can produce an edible and attractive—especially in a darkened room—product, I am really a hack when compared to the professionals. But hoping to improve, I keep working at it (and rejoice in devouring the failures).

There are lots of sources of information on making shell-molded chocolates in both the amateur and professional settings—the best may be Peter Greweling’s “Chocolates and Confections: Formula, Theory, and Technique for the Artisan Confectioner”—so I am not going to try to teach you how to make them. What I will do is describe some of the concepts and techniques I’ve learned over the years that have helped me.

Chocolate: There’s a lot of brands and flavors to choose from. The molded shell needs to be made from a chocolate that can be tempered, or in other words, develop the right crystal structure to produce the hard shell we associate with this type of confection. Not all chocolate can be tempered. Chocolate sold as “coverture” generally can be tempered, and is mostly sold pre-tempered, but you’ll need special equipment to take advantage of the temper. Generally in the home, we have to re-temper the chocolate again before molding.

Taste a sample of the chocolate before buying a quantity of it. The taste of chocolate is quick complex. Ignore brand names, origins, and marketing terms. Choose strictly by taste. If possible, buy the chocolate as disks, wafers, or pistoles. In this form, the chocolate is ready to temper without having to chop it first. If stuck with bar chocolate, I will usually pass it through a rotary grater instead of hand chopping. The smaller the pieces you work with the easier it is to quickly melt the chocolate while tempering.

The white material used to decorate the chocolates in the picture is not chocolate. It is sold as “white vanilla coating” and contains no chocolate. It is formulated to use for inexpensive coatings, and is generally available in many colors and flavors. There are many things you can do with coatings by themselves, but great shell-molded chocolates is not one of them.

Tempering: If you read this far, you most likely do not have a tempering machine and will be doing it by hand. In Europe, packages of coverture for professional use have the tempering temperatures written on the side of the tub or box. In the US, it may be possible to get the information from the manufacturer, but not always. My experience has been that the widely published general tempering temperatures seem to work just fine.

When I took a college-level chocolate class, we were forced to use “insta-read” dial thermometers when we were hand tempering. These are better than nothing, but they really make the whole process harder than necessary. In 2001, when I was a stagiaire at the Auberge du Schœnenbourg in Riquewihr, France, Rémy, the pastry chef, attempted to teach me how to temper chocolate the “traditional” way. His thermometer was the underside of his lower lip. When he wanted to judge the chocolate’s temperature, he would dab a little on his calibrated lip, similar to testing a baby bottle on your wrist or a baby’s bath with your elbow. I could never get it. What works really good for me is an infrared thermometer. They were expensive when I purchased mine, but I’ve noticed that the price has dropped significantly in recent years. Overall, I don’t find infrared thermometers overly useful in the kitchen unless you want to temper chocolate or calibrate your oven. Surface temperature is not the data point desired when determining the doneness of a roast. They are limited to measuring the surface temperature of materials that are opaque in the 8 to 12 µm spectrum, which includes most food items. With tempering, because of your constant stirring, the surface temperature will come reliably close to the overall temperature of the chocolate.

Molds: These can make or break your shell-molded chocolate experience. I am fortunate that my first experience with making shell-molded chocolates was in France at a restaurant that used high-quality, hard-plastic molds. When I later took the aforementioned class, the only time we made shell-molded chocolates we were given flimsy, cheap, blow-molded plastic molds to use. I immediately saw the difference the first time I tried to get the chocolates to release from the mold, and they all stayed in their cavities with nary a budge. The instructor was clueless, having never even seen a commercial mold. (She was actually clueless on many things related specifically to chocolate and cooking in general.) Even though the good molds are 15 to 20 times more expensive than the cheap ones, the results and ease of use are worth the extra expense.

Because of differences in the manufacturing process between the two mold types, hard-plastic molds have clean, sharp corners at the entrance of the cavities which yield a square-edge base for the finished chocolate. The cavity surfaces are highly polished, which produce shiny chocolates and make it possible for the finished chocolates to release from the molds without effort. The smooth, flat, rigid surface makes it easier to scrape excess chocolate from the surface of the mold. There are many more patterns available in the cheap molds, but I’ve been able to find plenty of the hard-plastic variety suitable for mignardise.

If you invest in hard-plastic molds, it is important to protect the cavities when not in use. After use, I wash the mold in hot, soapy water and thoroughly towel dry. I then “polish” each cavity with a soft terrycloth towel to ensure that there are no water stains that might etch the surface. I also re-polish the cavities before each use. To store the molds, I tightly wrap them individually in plastic wrap to keep them clean.

Workspace: Making shell-molded chocolates requires a workspace with good lighting. I’ve tried making chocolates in dark kitchens and the process is much more difficult. It’s hard to see differences in dark-chocolate surfaces without adequate lighting. Your room temperature should be on the warm side. If your room is just below the lowest softening temperature of the chocolate, the fluid chocolate won’t solidify as fast as if your room is cool. This will give you a longer time to work with the chocolate in the molds. Some people warm their molds to 25 to 30 °C (77 to 86 °F) to also retard the setting of the chocolate.