Hi All,

I am novice into cake decoration.With high hopes of gifting a beautiful cake with tempered chocolate bow on top ,i made all the bows using dark chocolate a week in advance and put then in air tight container and put them away in the refrigerator,

After a week once the cake was baked ,i assembled them and unfortunatly my bows started breaking up.especially the ones in the bottom layer !

Please someone suggest me as to why this happened? 

How do i prevent them from breaking in the future ?

Can i store my chocolate decorations in the refrigerator ?Was that the reason that it become so fragile once brought to room temperature???

Please help.

Eagerly awaiting a solution . I have a cake to make in 2 days .

b)  I also require someone to help me with making tempered chocolate flower .

Thanks in advance .

I would recommend watching Ann Reardon's YouTube channel "How To Cook That". She works with chocolate and has some great tutorials on tempering chocolate and different types of chocolate to use. She's from Australia so she uses some different terms but usually explains them. 

I honestly would recommend using candy melt "chocolate" instead of worrying about tempering....especially if you want a bow that stands up and remains hard. 

Her channel is a HUGE help to anyone wanting to make some really cool cakes and chocolates!!

Thank u much stitches for your reply.I really appreciate it .Yes i used acetate sheets to make them .

I am attaching a couple of pics of my broken bows .

Most of them broke away ( especially all the ones in the bottom row) at the place where the loop is bent and joined as in the first pic.

Some of them broke in between like the ones you see in the second pic.

It was a disaster as everything started breaking one by one .I really had a bow cake in mind and i was so devastated with the one i had to give to my friend

Please help me with your inputs.Hopefully the next one I will be doing in a day r two atleast turns out well.

Thank you 

Thank you mfeagan .I did look at her link earlier but could not find any videos for making a chocolate bow .

So had to look for other videos.

Thanks,

Newcakepassion

No she doesn't have any videos for chocolate bows but goes into detail about chocolate and different types to use for different applications...how to temper, etc. :)

The problem is your chocolate isn't in temper. The way I can tell is it's not shiny. Chocolate spread on acetate sheets will be VERY shiny. You apparently got very close to being in temper because the top edge of the first bow does have some nice shine. But as you worked it lost temper, you can tell that by how dull the second and third bow loops are.

You did a great job for a novice getting your chocolate thin and forming your loops! Your on the right track the only way to do this better is to get your chocolate in temper and practice.

To do that, I highly suggest you switch to semi-sweet chocolate it's MUCH easier to temper and work with than milk chocolate. (So again, you're really doing some advanced work here by using milk chocolate!) When semi-sweet chocolate is 'in temper' when you look at it melted in your bowl there's a certain haze to it, that really looks as if it's not tempered, but it is. Where as if your melted chocolate has no haze on the surface and just looks fine like melted chocolate in your bowl, it's actually not tempered. Strange but true.

So keep doing what your doing making the bow loops and study up on tempering. :)

To keep things realistic, given your time line..........if I was you I would switch to using chocolate plastic. It's so much easier than tempered chocolate, the difference is like night and day.