National Boss Day 2006 - Part One - Chocolate

Monday was National Boss Day. Hurry, it's not too late to get him/her something. OK, maybe it is. Anyway, Lorrie and her coworkers wanted to get their boss a little something so Lorrie and I came up with some different options to create. The theme was NASCAR and her boss' favorite driver, Tony Stewart. This gave us the colors to work with: white, orange, and brown. You may recognize these as the colors of Home Depot, which is the major sponsor of the #20 car Tony drives. So we had the theme and colors, we then decided to do something in chocolate and a couple of cookies.

First, the chocolates. I had done some chocolate work last Christmas and I enjoyed it immensely. I wanted to try something in this area again. So while we're shopping, we found the molds for NASCAR type cars. The molds even included a place for the lollipop stick so we went with that. We grabbed two of them. I had some white candy coating and dark chocolate already so we picked up some of the orange candy coating. The orange was pretty close to the Home Depot orange so it worked out great and I didn't have to worry about color matching. This was pretty simple to do. Melt the chocolate/candy coating, put the stick in the mold, and pour. Since I could only make ten candies at any one time, I didn't bring out the double boiler. I used some ceramic bowls that hold heat well and I could put a handful of the candy discs in at one time. I used the microwave to melt everything but I did it on a low setting and stopping frequently to stir and make sure it wasn't getting too hot. I did screw up once with the white and forgot to decrease the power setting and it didn't burn really but formed brown crystal-like things. I scraped that batch and cleaned everything and started again so it didn't hurt anything. I didn't like the fact the molds alternated which direction the stick went but its possible this mold was not intended for chocolate. I used a small spatula to scrape the molds so it worked fine. I can't say it was hard work either. Melting took a couple of minutes, pouring took about two minutes, waiting about five minutes to scrape the molds and then about an hour in the fridge waiting for them to set. Lorrie and her mother wrapped them in plastic and attached flags to a few. We ended up with about 45 of them. I think they turned out well.