car wheels on a gravel road

You know where I'm going with this, right? 

DONUT SHAPED ROCKY ROAD! Hand-held chocolate candy wheels full of fun. Fun being nuts, raisins and marshmallows of course. Where will I draw the line with this donut thing I'm doing?

I want to tell you, chocolate is tricky stuff with a bad "temper". I researched tempering chocolate for a few hours until I found this link HERE. I followed the gentle heating, cooling and lightly heating again instructions as carefully as I could, and folded in my nuts and things at the end of the process. The donuts became less melty in my hand over the course of a few hours, so don't be dismayed if you think you didn't temper them right. There might still be hope. Give it time.

If you follow the directions on melting and tempering the chocolate in the link above, the rest is a breeze. I used Scharffen Berger 70% cacao bittersweet chocolate (a 9.7 oz. baking bar), some nice, handcrafted marshmallows (which were a pain to cut with scissors), raisins, unsalted pistachios, and big flakes of sea salt. Take a look.

Chop/shave.

Use mini marshmallows. This was frustrating.

Line the pans with foil liners/slings. I lined twelve, but could only stretch the 9.7 oz.

bar to make eight big donuts. Mini-donut pans would be a lot of fun for this recipe.

Prep everything. Once you start the tempering process, you've got to be alert

and your hands will be too busy to chop anything, let alone take a photo.

Post-tempering folding in of "fun".

Get everything into lined pans, then stud with more marshmallow pieces and sea salt.

Right?

I wasn't totally sure how to finish setting these beauties up. I put them on the counter for twenty minutes, in the freezer for five, then in the fridge for ten. When I took them out they still melted in my hands a bit. BUT, after a few solid hours on the counter they turned into candy. They could be handled by a toddler and the chocolate at the edges of the marshmallow bits became shell-like and really fun to eat.

I did peel and eat one right away of course.

Nuts!

Leaving them to rest for a while definitely improved the quality.

The backside. Yikes!

I was considering doing a fudge instead of a candy, but I will have to experiment with it first to see how the fudge works with the pan and such. For now, these will definitely do! I could see changing these up at the holidays, adding dried cranberries instead of raisins, studding with some dragées and tying up with a bow. Little wreaths instead of wheels. Sometimes I amaze myself. ;)


By the way, if you're not familiar, I'm doing a little ongoing project involving donut pans. You can see HERE!