I am a confirmed chocoholic, so I was determined to find a way to buy or make sugar free chocolate. I started with the Carbolite bars, which are pretty good, but I thought I could do better.
So I melted baker's unsweetened chocolate and added sweetener (sucralose); it was good, but my DH thought the chocolate was still kind of bitter, no matter how sweet I made it.
Then I tried adding butter, then cream, but then the chocolate wouldn't harden. So I added paraffin, which helped, but the flavor still wasn't right.
Then someone in this forum suggested adding cocoa butter, which turned out to be the missing ingredient.
So then of course I needed better chocolate, and bought an 11 pound block of unsweetened Callebaut Belgian chocolate, which made a BIG difference. And then of course I just had to have chocolate molds so they would look like candy bars!
Anyway, I melt together 1/2 ounce chocolate, 1/2 ounce paraffin, and 1 ounce cocoa butter, add the sucralose and usually vanilla extract or peppermint extract or other flavoring and maybe nuts. I pour this into the molds and put them in the freezer for a few minutes. The resulting candy bars are SOOOO good!
The chocolate still melts in your hands a bit, but I'm going to take a class on working with chocolate, so hopefully there's an answer to that problem. But if there isn't, I'm still deleriously happy with these the way they are!
And for those who think LC is an expensive WOE, I figured out that a one-ounce candy bar (Carbolite bars are an ounce and a half, I think) costs a grand total of 23 cents to make, as opposed to around $2 for the Carbolite bars, depending on where you buy them. Not bad for Belgian chocolates!
And even better news is that each one ounce bar has exactly 2 grams of carbs, period, no questions about whether or how to count the carbs in maltitol or other sugar alcohols.
Do I sound obsessed?
HTH,
Karla