Jill,

If the recipe calls for paraffin, I posted it before figuring out how to temper chocolate. Now I use 4 ounces of cocoa butter and 2 ounces of Callebaut unsweetened chocolate (any high grade unsweetened chocolate will do, but IMHO there's no point in doing all this work unless you start with really good ingredients I found the Callebaut at www.chocolatesource.com and bought a 5 pound block of it :eek. I cut all of that up very fine; actually I use a pastry scraper to shave the chocolate and cocoa butter.

I follow the directions for tempering the chocolate I found at www.allrecipes.com/cb/sbs/chocolate/default.asp, which was the simplest method I could find. One note, however: in step 5 they tell you to cool the chocolate down and that one way is to add small pieces of non melted chocolate. So in the beginning I put 2/3 of the chocolate and all the cocoa butter, plus sweetener equal to about 3/4 cup of sugar, into the top of the double boiler and follow the directions. When I get to the cooling part of step 5 I add the rest of the chocolate. This speeds up the cooling.

I figured that if I were going to go as far as tempering chocolate I may as well go all the way, so I bought molds for chocolate bars, which are really cheap. I also bought molds for filled candies and am experimenting with those, too. If you are interested, the molds came from www.tcbsupply.com, but there are of course other places. But I think they were the only ones I found who had the molds for chocolate bars.

I could never live without chocolate, so I just had to find a way to make it LC. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to help.

Karla