From Plain to Extraordinary: How to Add Fruit to Your Homemade Chocolate

What could be better than a bar of homemade dry fruit and nut chocolate?

Candied tropical fruit and mixed nuts made my white homemade chocolate come alive. While I do enjoy white chocolate occasionally, it does sometimes get a bit boring as it can lack flavour and taste a bit too one-note. But then I made these bars and not only do they look very pretty, but they also tasted incredible. Read on the see how to make dry fruit chocolate at home.

I was browsing in my local shop here in Thailand when I saw a section of candied fruits. There was a wide selection of candied tropical fruits in a range of vibrant colours. I just knew right then that I had to pair them with chocolate.

Luckily, I was just finishing making a batch of white chocolate in my wet stone grinder, a request from a few students of mine. So slightly overdoing it, I bought half the aisle and rushed home excited to see what I could create.

How to make dry fruit chocolate

So, the first thing I had to do was to temper the chocolate straight out of the grinder. I have been using the Premier Wet Stone Grinder for 6 months now and it’s a fantastic machine. Of course, you can just buy white chocolate, melt it down and temper it yourself to make these bars.

Tempering is the heating and cooling of chocolate to change the crystal structure. It makes sure the chocolate is firm, shiny and doesn’t melt in your hands. I warmed the white chocolate to 45C in a double boiler and then straight away cooled it down to 26C in an ice bath. Then I warmed it up again to 28C to bring it into temper and to be ready to pour in the moulds.

These bars are so fun and easy to put together and you can be as arty as you like. It was time to get those creative juices flowing. I opened up the packets of candied fruit and nuts and laid them out on the table.

“Candying” is infusing slices of fruit in a sugar syrup to absorb the moisture from within and to preserve it. It makes the fruit become soft and translucent, takes away most of its bitterness and absorbs the sugary sweetness.

What fruit goes with chocolate?

Now comes the fun bit, arranging the fruit and nuts to make my own personalised chocolate bars. There were so many types of candied fruit it was difficult to decide what to match with what. But that’s what made it so much fun. I guess any type of fruit would match with chocolate and it would completely be down to personal preference.

You can candy the fruit yourself, which takes about an hour, but it needs to be dried on a rack overnight before being mixed with the chocolate. I may make some myself in the future to share with you.

I was constantly nibbling at the fruit as I was putting them into the chocolate moulds. It was one for the mould and one for myself.

I realised there was a couple of ways you could put the fruit in the chocolate and I tried both. You can put small pieces of fruit in the mould first and then pour the chocolate over the top. This created chocolate bars with sprinkles of fruity colours dotted all over the front.

The other way was to pour the chocolate into the moulds first and then press the pieces of fruit and nuts into the back whilst it was still wet.

The great thing about these bars is that you can try any combination and use any type of fruit to suit your taste. You can also do it as a family as kids will have so much fun making these.

The final result was so much better than I expected and my students went absolutely crazy for them.

If you’re not already tempted to make these because you don’t like white chocolate, you can also use milk and dark chocolate. Of course, I think certain combinations suit different types of chocolate better.

But, I think the candied white chocolate bars look the prettiest. The vibrant colours stand out that much more

Let me know if you tried these for yourself!