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Guys please suggest me how to increase shelf life of Ganache based chooclates?

I am planning to put chocolates in retail and want them to survive more than 6 months...suggestions please

Leonidas Confiserie SA is a chocolate producer with an international presence, based in Belgium. The company's focus is pralines (chocolate shells with soft fillings and marzipan, solid chocolates, and other confections. The company is named after its Greek founder, Leonidas Kestekides, a confectioner who moved from Anatolia to the United States in the late 19th century. The logo used on Leonidas chocolates shows an effigy of the Greek warrior Leonidas, King of Sparta.

Visit our Facebook and webpage at:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Leonidas-Chocolate/180321615342183

http://leonidas-chocolates.ca/

We make about 800 truffles every year for Christmas presents and this is first time we tried molding them. It is so much easier and faster.
And did you know if you increase the recipe by 15%you get just enough ganache to fill two small round molds completely.
-Thanks,
Kevin Creedon

Tom Drahos of Windows on the Water and I, Tom Neuhaus, president of Project Hope and Fairness, are doing a Molecular Gastronomy demo at the SLO Botanical Garden in San Luis Obispo, Dec. 16, to benefit Project Hope and Fairness, a non-profit established to help cocoa farmers. Last summer, we donated $4500 of tools to cocoa farmers in Ghana and Cameroon. To learn more about the demo, see www.projecthopeandfairness.org and click on the last item in the Events box. To read about last summer's trip, go to www.sweetearthchocolates.blogspot.com .

Emmanuel Hamon, French Pastry chef hasjust won the contest of"The most beautiful Chrismas Log cake2011". contest organized by Macarons& Gourmandises (N1 French media and online dedicated to pastry / chocolate high end). For this second edition, Emmanuel Hamon did presented a cake entitled "Christmas in New York." Inspired by Manhattan, this log-colored taxis in New York buildings decorated with chocolate has learned surprised by its amazing design and originality. The competition was tough in the face offamous pastryhouses of Paris. A "Christmas in New York" will be offered to order a limited edition (80 copies).

The 8 th time I visited Le Salon du Chocolat in Paris. To be honest: I love it and I hate it. Its too big and too crowded. But I have to go because every year I find some very special things that makes the trip worth it. First I check which chocolatiers won the awards from Le Club Des Croqueurs de Chocolat. I mostly agree with their opinion. Five of the twelve best were at Le Salon: Pascal Le Gac, Vincent Guerlais, Jean-Paul Hvin, Sadaharu Aoki and ES Koyama. The last one I had not heard of before so I bought some of his chocolates. Wow, this is good!

If you are interested in small artisan bean-to-bar chocolate makers you have to go to London. But for chocolates-bonbons I think Paris is the place to go. Although the fillings are very traditional, they are of superb quality. Of the small chocolate makers we met in London only Bojesen was at Le Salon. The curious chocolate lovers you could find at his stall: Chloe and Evert-Jan. The Brazilian booth had also some interesting bars that I didnt taste before. So full shopping bags and an empty wallet when I left Le Salon.

Tasting could begin!

This was the first year of the Single Origin Event in The Netherlands. Hopefully this will be a yearly event from now on. The location was Restaurant Merkelbach in Amsterdam. The event was organized by Erik Sauer of El Sauco, distributor of some very beautiful single origin chocolates (yes also Original Beans!) and Erik Spande, owner of Chocoltl chocolate shop in Amsterdam. They invited Santiago (Pacari), Mott (Grenada), Philipp (Original Beans) and Kees (Metropolitan Deli) to tell the unique story behind their chocolate. And of course we tasted three different chocolates of each chocolate maker. Geert Vercruysse and his wife Katrien came over especially from Belgium for this event. Geert made some chocolate-bonbons filled with ganaches with Grenada, Pacari and Original Beans. Delicious and very beautiful! You can now buy them at Chocoltl. At the after party Marilla Erkens served a gorgeous vegan soup (based on cauliflower and other vegetables and spices) with Grenada nibs! Wow, that tasted really good!

It took me some time to recover from my first Chocolate Triathlon in October. Fortunately I am in good shape again and I can tell you about my experiences. The three parts were: Chocolate Unwrapped in London, The Single Origin Event in Amsterdam and Le Salon du Chocolat in Paris. Now up to London!

This was my first visit to Chocolate Unwrapped. The event was held in Vinopolis near Borough Market, a beautiful location. I helped both days at the booth of Original Beans. A lot of people visited the event and showed interest in our chocolate. I often heard: very delicious chocolate! Besides the bars we had something very special: freshly made chocolates by Geert Vercruysse. Cream-based ganaches with our Piura Porcelana, Beni Wild Harvest and Cru Virunga. Damian Allsop made water-based ganaches with the Piura and Virunga. It is very interesting to taste what happens if you add cream or water to these two chocolates. A completely different experience!

The very top British chocolatiers and chocolate companies were at the show: Duffy, William Curley, Paul A Young, Rococo, Paul Wayne Gregory, Lauden, Hotel Chocolat, Melt, Artisan du Chocolat, Sir Hans Sloane and Baruzzo. Also chocolate makers from France, Switzerland Hungary, Grenada, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Ecuador: Valrhona, Akessons, Idilio, Rzsavlgyi, Szanto, The Grenada Chocolate Company, Amedei, C-Amaro, Benot Nihant, Oialla, Friis Holm, Pacari and Kallari.

Of course I did some shopping myself. It was very nice to meet the Idilio-guys Niklaus and Pascal. I love their chocolate and I guess I was their best customer. I invited them to become member of The Chocolate Life and to tell us more about their company. So hopefully we hear more of them very soon. Someone who is already on this site but I didnt met before is Benot Nihant from Belgium. He and his wife were very proud to present their first bean to bars chocolate. My new-coming favourite of this event is Rasmus Bo Bojesen with his Wild Bolivian Oialla. This chocolate has a very mild and delicate taste. Take a look at:

http://www.oialla.dk I also enjoyed the presentation of Friis Holm. We tasted his new dark-milk chocolate that in my opinion doesnt taste like a traditional dark-milk. This one is very fruity: melon! Hungarian Rzsavlgyi won a few awards by the Academy of Chocolate this year so of course I must have these bars! His Principe I like most. The wrappings are lovely, they look like very special little gifts.

It was very nice to meet with and talk to all those chocolate minded people. Alex and Martin of Seventy Percent Club and Dom of Chocablog used the opportunity to taste our new Organic Piura. I had a few samples with me. Their first impression: they like this one more then the former recipe!

The most amazing lady was our neighbour: Lauden. http://www.laudenchocolate.com/

She makes gorgeous fresh fruit-based chocolates. What energy she has! She completely sold out in just one day!

Published by Max Felchlin AG, Schwyz, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary. (2008)

Since visiting Felchlin 2010 and2011, I must admit Im addicted to there chocolate and there philosophy. This book is to interesting not to blog, so I must share this on my blog.

The Planter: From Gatherer to Large Landowner

The cacao tree is a delicate plant that needs special care and attention. Farmers often cultivate small seedlings under mat roofs. After six months, they then move the plnats onto the shade afforded by overhanging neighbouring trees, such as mango or avocado trees, or shelter them below high coconut palm or banana trees, sometimes even sheltering them under straw roofs to protect them from an excess of sun and wind.

Farmers often prune the plants without impairing their quality, cutting back the cacao trees that grow both on plantations and in the wild to a height of two to four metres. However, some farmers shy away from this type of tree husbandry, since superstition and mysticism are sometimes stroger than fact: if it is suggested that they chop off a branch, the farmers resist saying that the tree is a father and that they cannot cut off the hand that feeds them.They do not want to believe that the tree could die because it cannot regenerate.

Farmers keep the ground below the trees tidy and occasionally mulch it. They make sure that the trees do not become infested with pests. As the plants grows relatively close together, infestation can have a devastation effect and take hold of growing areas. All manner of different pest thrive in the fertile and energetic tropical climate, for example, fungi such as witches broom or fruit blight. Certain insects, such as longicorns and buprestidae, fruit flies, butterfly larvae, cocoa pod borers and cocoa mealybugs, also pose a danger to cacao trees.

After years of the uncontrolled use of pesticides and fungicides, there have been at least isolated attemps to return to the old methods. To large extent, these attemps have been driven by the high quality requirements of customers interested in the best and finest beans. Organic methods not only create trust, they also work.

The leaves that fall from the cacao tree are more eco-friendly than artificial fertilisers and insecticides. The dead matter decomposes to form humus that enhances the quality of the growing cocoa beans. Rambling plantations cultures often look neat and tidy, free as they are from undergrowth, weeds and other plants that could thrive on the same humus. However, the cocoa beans thus cultivated often all taste the same and a little bland because the ground in which their roots grow lacks the richness that comes from diversity. Afew ambitious chocolatiers continue to search tirelessly for new select varieties, resorting either to wild varieties or to those that have been cultivated in the Rain Forest, where ther is no lack of biodiversity. The humus that occurs in the wild gives cocoa a certain earthy quality that is the reason for its special flavour. Cocoa beans are cultivated or harvested in four different ways and these influence subsequent processing and marketing in particular:

(example of wild cocoa: http://www.maranonchocolate.com/ )

Gathering This is a very rare form of cocoa harvesting. In Beni, a remote region in the Bolivian part of the Amazone drainage basin in the lowlands of the Andes, indigenous families gather the fruits of wild cocoa plants growing is a sometimes swampy, sometimes arid landscape. Like truffle hunters, the families keep the whhereabouts of their trees fiercely guarded secret; apart from gathering the fruits, they leave the trees in peace, neither cultivating them nor planting nurseries. The trees are simply left over to grow wild. This is a unique from of harvesting and, even 600 years ago, searching for and gathering cocoa took place in the shadow os small, semi-professional cultivation. The wild beans are about half size of cultivated beans, there is greater waste, processing is more complex and some machines used in the manufacture of chocolate even have to be specially adjusted for the Beni beans. However, the resulting chocolate is the most exquisite in the world.

Bonbons made for Original Beans, Beni Wild.

Cooperative Cultivation on smallholdings; in order to promote their interests, smallholders working in various areas of agriculture come together to form cooperatives. These smallholders grow limited quantities of cocoa on small scale, either in gardens or on terraces, on smallholderings, in mini plantations or mixed cultivation: the cacao trees grow on and around small haciendas in the Rain Forest. Cooperatives are generally made up of 40 to 50 smallholders and in exceptional cases, as many as 200 smallholders. Cooperatives rarely produce more than 20 to 50 tons of cocoa beans per annum. Smallholders believe in diversification and also grow sugercane, tree tomatoes, palm herats and coffee, as well as keep a few animals; one farmer typically produces between 200 and 300 kilogrmas of cocoa beans but rarely more than 500 kiligrams per annum.

The members of a coopeartive elect a chairperson, who is assisted by between five to ten colleagues. This system can result in lengthy meetings. The purchaser who is interested in the origin of cocoa and who wishes to have a say in its quality has to have a great deal of patience and must be prepared to keep repeating his or her wishes each time a new chairperson is elected. The cooperative system is slow and ponderous and, although members often have only a limited knowledge of business, cooperatives are widly supported.

http://www.pacarichocolate.com/index.php

Hacienda This is the realm of the farmer. The haciendadiffers from a large plantation in that it could easily be described as the counterpart to the coopeartive. The hacienda can best compared with a large farm in the Swiss midland. Its infrastructure exeeds that of the smallholding idyll and it employs staff all year round since there is also plenty of work for employees during the low season, for example, tending trees and maintaining the infrastructure, such as the fermentation and drying facilities. It is not uncommmon to have as many as 20 people on the payroll.

One example is the Haceinda Elvesia in the Dominican Republic, wich was once under Swiss ownership. Specialising in cocoa cultivation and with a tight infrastucture, it produces anything between 60 an 100 tons cocoa beans per year a sufficient amount for direct sale; smallholders, on the other hand, have no option but to pool their harvests and sell them as part of an association, such as the cooperative.

Cultivation, figures in thousands of tons 2007

Plantation This is characterised by rational mass cultivation and by industrialised monoculture; it is not farmers who work here but managers, administrators and agriculture workers. The focus is on cultivation varieties of cocoa bean that require a minimum amount of effort and yet generate a maximum amount of profit. The beans are cultivated over sometimes huge, uniform areas, The subtleties of the aroma are lost and become almost irrelevant in the pursuit of the main obkective, namely to produce ready-to-use raw material for mass production.

NEXT TIME: The Bean From Harvesting to Shipping

I'd never been to one of these gigs, so it was interesting. The first aroma I encountered was that of tons of spices. I thought they'd be related to some variety of chocolate bing made or sampled, but they were just spices being sold by a spice vendor. A little odd, especially at the entrance.

I actually thought there would be more vendors, but perhaps I had more grandiose expectations. Favorite was the Praus booth. They were sampling every bar they had and they'd really speak at length with you. The Cluizels and Guittards were there and the upstarts as well, including one who loaded her bars with all manner of antioxidant ingredients (cranberries, acai, nuts, herbs, chili, etc.) and seemed to enjoy giving mini-lessons on the nutritional advantages/sustainalility/eco-friendliness of her bars. They weren't my favorites but she was nice to speak with.

Anyone else have a similar experience? Is this typical of chocolate shows? Just asking. BTW -- there were some bargains to be had on Sunday. Lots of places offering 20-30% off. I picked up a 72% bar of Payard for $6 (usually $8) and even then the associate offered me 2 for $10. They're decent sized, so I went for it. The Pralu folks had these bundles of about 9 or so of their 50 gm samples that were $40 and they had them going for $25. I think I paid 30 Euros for themin Paris, so it was a bargain if you like them (I did).