Petra Cox: I am Petra Cox with Mom's Apple Pie Bakery in Occoquan, Virginia. Right now, I am making a Chocolate Butter Cream frosting for our rich chocolate cake. For this recipe you are going to need some nice, smoothly melted dark chocolate. You can use bitter sweet chocolate if you like to. I just love the flavor of dark chocolate. So, what I have is three ounces of dark chocolate, and it's chopped up and put in a microwave-safe bowl here.
There are various ways to melt chocolate if you need to. You can use a double boiler on your oven, that's a nice, safe way to do it without burning the chocolate, but I find that the easiest is just to put it in the microwave about probably 20 seconds at a time, and then stir it. So that way, you are not melting it all in one big chunk. It can get melted smoothly without burning.
Let's start with 20 seconds, then I am going to stir it, and I'll do as much time as it takes to melt the amount of chocolate that I have. So at this point just some chocolate on the bottom and some of the smaller, little shards of chocolate I melted, but they might seem a little tedious to stir it each time, but it really is necessary to keep it from burning. You don't want the same part to get hot over and over.
When you are melting something like white chocolate; that can be a little tricky, because white chocolate will hold its shape, but be completely melted, so it won't look liquidy until you stir it, and you'll find that little chunks of white chocolate are actually melted inside. So that's why it's important to actually stir it in between. White Chocolate has higher fat content than regular chocolate milk chocolate, or dark chocolate. So that melts actually very fast. So you got to be careful with white chocolate. It takes a little longer for something with such high cocoa content as dark chocolate.
This is actually the contents of one three ounce bar of dark chocolate. Sometimes towards the end it might take a little less than 20 seconds at a time. You might want to pump it down to only 10 seconds in between mixing, just so that you don't overcook it. It's getting a little smoother now. You can see there's just some larger lump that needs to be melted down a little. It will probably only take 10 or 20 seconds more.
So there were some lumps when I took it out of the microwave, but as I am mixing it, the lumps are mixing in with the melted chocolate, and they are melting because of the heat of the chocolate that is already melted. So there we have some nicely, smoothly melted chocolate. Just keep in mind that you've got to mix it often, so that it doesn't get burnt, but this is a nice quick alternative to melt in chocolate in a double burner on your stove top. So there it is.