How to Paint a Chocolate Shell by Ghyslain Chocolatier

The first question that is always asked to me when they see our chocolate color is basically how we do paint the chocolate. Is it something that we paint on top of the candy or how does it happen?

And the way it happens is we paint inside the mold which is a polycarbonate mold that everybody uses, and it’s cleaned up first with a cotton ball to polish it to make it very shiny.

The first ingredient that’s very important is the cocoa butter that we do; we use pre-colored cocoa butter because it gives you a lot more consistency in your coloring.

When you do your mix yourself, it’s very difficult to get the right color every time and you can have a difference when you send it to your store or to the customer. You have differences.

So, by using a pre-colored cocoa butter from a company, it always gives you a better result. And using that cocoa butter, it’s very important to have the right temperature.

If it’s used too hot, it’s gonna give you a dull finish; if it’s used too cold, it’s going to clog your shooting gun. So the temperature of 89 degree(s) Fahrenheit is the perfect temperature to use inside the gun.

There are all sorts of guns that you keep in the hot box while you are shooting the cocoa butter. We just use a car gun at the shop. You can use all professionals from different companies that there is out there but with the number of guns we use, we prefer to go with a more common gun.

The first step of the painting, naturally, is to have, first, the mold at the right temperature which is room temperature – around 72 degree(s). Choose the color and after that, start to make the effect that you’re looking for. It could be small dots, big dots, or long lines, short lines. All sorts of different shots you can have.

And another way to do it is with a splatter which we do by mixing the cocoa butter and use a brush and the brush will give you more lines instead of dots. The process is reversed, so the first color you’re gonna send in your mold is the first color, you’re gonna see on top of your candy.

Once you fill up your gun with the cocoa butter, you have to make sure you don’t have another color inside so you have the perfect color. And you shoot your mold completely to make the total shell of the mold.

Turning it either way and keep shooting until you have all the cavities filled. After you finish shooting and covered all the cavities, you need to scrape the top of the mold so this way the next coat is not going to mix with your cocoa butter.

Once you’ve finished shooting and scraping, you need to let dry the cocoa butter. So about 10-15 minutes would be enough.

If not, once you do your shell with your chocolate, you could have bleeding coming out of your cocoa butter. For the finish, the last coat.

On this one, we’re going to do a solid piece so you can do a shell and fill it with ganache but if you do a solid piece like we’re doing right now, you just fill it with the tempered chocolate and after that, you let it sit for, I would say, half an hour and after that, you can pull them out of the mold just by reversing the mold.

So, as you can see, by doing the inverted coloring, you can see it’s very very shiny with contact with the plastic, and all the different colors and all the different designs. It gives you a really shiny candy.

You can also view this video on Youtube and subscribe to their Channel. Ghyslain Chocolatier