Making chocolate is a very long and difficult process if you are making it from the bean. For families and peop le doing it from home this is just not going to be the way forward. Not only all of this but you will find that your family may get bored pretty quickly and all of the things that you need to buy will be pretty expensive to have.
The way that I would do things is to actually buy the bars from the supermarkets and then melt them to create brand new shapes and things to do, melting them isn’t as easy as you might think. Once the chocolate has melted you need to make sure it crystallises a bit on the side. Make sure that you are mixing it all of the time too. If you can see that the chocolate is starting to harden than hand a hair dryer to someone. Although this may look a bit stupid it really does work very well indeed.
If you are moulding the chocolate into a shape then consider using different types of chocolate for different things. By this I mean paint the details in a darker colour, let it set and then fill the mould in with milk chocolate. By using this method you will actually find that some of these moulds look very good indeed.
Chocolate is really good for making with your family just make sure you check out bakers books and confectionary recipe books as well as food books to ensure that you actually get all of it right.
Not burning the chocolate is the hardest thing to do so make sure you spend time looking into how to do this or you will find that you have wasted money on buying all of the chocolate.
