Recipe: Mango and passion fruit pralines

Mona Lisa, Water Lilies, The Starry Night – and fine, filled chocolate? 

Perhaps a praline will never qualify as a masterpiece in the same way a painting would, but there's no doubt that chocolate is an art form, and one of many we aim to perfect here at Culinary Arts Academy. The clue is most definitely in the name! 

Chocolate-making is a complex, highly detailed-oriented craft and precise rules must be followed.

Even the slightest mistake in technique or temperature can lead to the product being spoiled. A drop of water might mean your chocolate will deteriorate in a couple of days and a difference of up to two degrees when cooling can cause your chocolate to become brittle, or covered in a matte membrane.

Mango and passion fruit pralines

1. The first step is to choose a mold. This should be made exclusively of polycarbonate, as it gives the perfect lustre to chocolate and is strong enough not to break when hit.
2. For the design, we paint the forms with a natural food colouring with cocoa butter base, then leave to dry.
3. Next, we temper white chocolate to give it elasticity and strength. It will also extend its shelf life, and improve the consistency, color and heat resistance.
4. Then, we pour the chocolate into the mold and sharply turn it over to get rid of the excess. This ‘shell’ will serve as the outer-casing of our sweets, so it should be thin, no more than 2mm. Next, we proceed to the filling: in this case, we use caramel with passion fruit and mango, a simple recipe of 60% ordinary caramel (no milk) and 40% fresh fruit puree.
5. When the chocolate in the mold has frozen, we carefully fill our ‘shells’ with caramel, a little less than halfway full.
6. We make a classic dark chocolate ganache with the addition of rum, and cover the second half of the candy with ganache.
7. We cool again and there you have it! Our pralines are ready. The last step is to pull the candies out of the mold (by hitting it).

Fun Fact

Switzerland has the highest chocolate consumption per capita in the world. Each Swiss person eats on average 11.8 kilograms of chocolate per year!