Melting chocolate to make curls

Hi, I’m Sophie from BBC Good Food and I’m going to show you how to melt chocolate. I’ve just got a glass bowl over a pan of barely simmering water and I’m going to break my chocolate into evenly sized pieces. Always make sure that the pan is filled to just underneath the glass bowl because it’s the steam, rather than the water itself which helps to melt the chocolate Don’t be tempted to overmix otherwise it can go grainy If you are using milk or white chocolate be a little more careful because the lower cocoa solids mean it can split a bit more easily.

My chocolate’s lovely and melted now so I’m going to take it off the heat, be careful because the steam is very hot I’m going to pour this onto a flat baking tray. I’ll spread this out into an even, thin layer The great thing about dark chocolate is that it gets really smooth and glossy it would be great to decorate a cake with, or you could make it into a bark and use it as a present.

Now, we can just leave that to set, it’s better to leave it out of the fridge because it will retain its nice glossiness If you wanted to make this into a bark, you could sprinkle over some nice sprinkles or some biscuits, or I’m going to show you how to make some chocolate curls which look stunning on top of a cake.

Here’s some milk chocolate which I melted down in exactly the same way and it’s now set but still plyable I’m using a pallet knife beacuse I find this is the easiest way to make good curls. You want to get the baking tray as near to you as possible so you’ve got good purchase and you want to bend the pallet knife and really slowly, but quite firmly, roll it through the chocolate.

That’s a nice bigger curl Another way of making chocolate curls which is really good for cooking with kids is simply using a bar of chocolate and a peeler and all you do is grate down, and you get these lovely little spirals These mini white chocolate curls look great on top of a tart If you’re making these in advance I’d leave them in the fridge to set then decorate with them however you fancy And that’s a guide on how to melt chocolate and make chocolate curls by BBC Good Food