Stop the traffik chocolate competition

Rkhooks had the great idea to launch an event to promote slave labour free chocolate. To participate the 'Stop the traffik chocolate competition' you should make a recipe with chocolate that is produced without slavery. I tried keeping it simple but keeping it simple doesn't mean that the end result is the way it should be...



My initial idea was to do something with white chocolate and pistachios but traffik free white chocolate is hard to get by in The Hague apparently. So I bought milk chocolate instead. To make the recipe I had to roast pistachios in the oven. When I spread them on a baking sheet I discovered a stowaway in the pistachios that had the appearance of a larva of some kind :( so away with the pistachio recipe. After a few days I had a new idea. I would make a chocolate bar with marzipan letters saying 'Stop the traffik'. Simple idea I thought at the time...it was simple making the marzipan letters but pretty time-consuming without alphabet cut-outs I can tell you! Tempering the chocolate should have been easy because I had already done that several times here, here and here. But still I messed it up! I'm starting to understand why people would want a chocolate tempering machine, pity it so expensive...



I measured the temperature before the chocolate melted and the thermometer read 105°F (41°C). I stirred until it was all melted and measured again: 120°F (49°C)...oops! That should have been 112°F (44°C)! I continued the way I should have by letting it cool down to 87°F (31°C) keeping my fingers crossed...which didn't help as you already saw ;)
Even though the result is not perfect, the message comes across and that's what's the most important!

The chocolate I used was Fair Trade Original biological Mascoa milk chocolate with mascobado sugar (raw cane sugar from the Philippines). This may sound delicious but I didn't like it that much. I don't eat a lot of pure milk chocolate but I've had much better ones...but those were not garanteed slave labour free!