Seedmama, That does sound like a reasonable substitution, but because we're talking about fats in canning I wouldn't make it myself (and I'm considered a safety-ignoring cowboy by some on this forum). It's not hard to get a hold of actual chocolate, after all. All, Boy, I really am forgetful in my old age! I made this chocolate-raspberry jam again yesterday with my two young visiting nieces (aged 9 and 11; one is my brother's youngest from Montreal and one is my sister's from Toronto, so they were having a visit with each other at their auntie's place in between). We had a lot of fun! We went raspberry picking the day before and they worked hard in the hot sun, and then in the hot kitchen, but were very proud to make labels and bring their creations home to their families. We got a bigger yield than the recipe called for---more like 8 pints than 6 or 7 --- and we also found it very runny. This was no problem, as it gave me a chance to explain to my new young canner nieces that there is no such thing as a failed jam, only successful sauce! But now I went looking for this old thread to reread, and I see that when I made this jam several years ago it ALSO came out runny, but then set up almost firm a few days later! So maybe that will happen again. I had to laugh at myself because I had the same thing with the boiling---we addded the sugar after a minute of what looked like a "full, roiling boil," but then when it heated back up again it boiled much harder and I thought we should have waited longer before adding it. Sigh! You'd think an editor would know to check her sources. Anyway, we used the recipe Gardengrl had posted, calling for 3 ounces of chocolate---used a 100-gram bittersweet bar of a quality grocery house brand. MMM is it good. If it doesn't set up to be spreadable it's going to end up getting stirred into oatmeal and poured on pancakes. We love to jazz up our winter breakfasts around here with home-canned jars from the happy harvest days.... Z, who enjoyed reliving her wedding and Annie's!

Only female I know in close proximity to me that doesn't want or need chocolate is my sister. She'll go for high carb foods every time over sweets. oakley, I have a wicked bad sweet tooth that I rarely fail to indulge in the evening. (Thank heavens for WWatchers desserts!) Really should do the hot chocolate thing at bedtime tho, any time I have a cup during the day, I get really drowsy. Forgot that I have two cannisters upstairs of Ghirardelli, dark chocolate and white mocha. (The white mocha mix is great on a cold day for anyone out there freezing, but has coffee in it so not good at night.) Didn't sleep last night, back to the same ole routine. That choc pie I had two nights ago and slept so well had a lot of very dark chocolate in it. Wonder if that's they key? And wonder if small bits/pieces would work? I'll have to experiment. Don't have anything in the house at the moment. As much sinful fun as it would be, can't be pigging out on chocolate mousse pie every night. :o

>>A "snobbing up" mistake may be using 70% or 100% cacao if the recipe was developed using 55%-60%. The flavor could be all "wrong">> Actually, it's not the flavor profile you need to worry about. It's the issue that using a high-number chocolate means there's more cacao solids in the chocolate, so it may react differently, especially in baking. Try making a Hershey's (or similar) recipe from 40 yrs ago with an 85% chocolate, and a cake could end up with a dry texture and insufficient rise. The SF Bay Area has become a hotbed of fine artisanal chocolates. Many do use soy lecithin and we have no problems with this. Tcho, Chocolatier Blue, La Foret (whose chocolates are used at The French Laundry in the Napa Valley, one of the four Northern CA restaurants with 3 Michelin stars), Recchiuti (our personal favorite), all use lecithin in some of their chocolate bars. If you want "pure" chocolate, one of the finest in the world is by Claudio Corallo. Alegio Chocolate sells his, and their own namesake line created by Enric Rovira, in a limited number of retail outlets worldwide. Corallo is widely known within the industry as one of the most difficult and brilliant chocolatiers. He is an OCD purist who not only grows heirloom cacao beans, but has the tiny inner "sprout" inside the cacao bean removed BY HAND - he feels it makes the chocolate bitter, the same way a green sprout will make a garlic clove bitter. Most of his own beans he rejects, which are then immediately purchased by high-end producers for their own artisanal chocolates. Corallo's chocolates have real "terroir", the same way fine wines do. For those who love bittersweet and high-cacao chocolates - which not all do, nothing wrong with that - Corallo's chocolates must be tasted to be believed. Alegio, in their Berkeley, CA location, does an hour-long chocolate tasting of Corallo chocolates (you can view part of his video at the link below, on their website, which illustrates Corallo's insistence upon quality and purity). They take you, step by step, from the lower cacao % to the higher %, with a taste half-way of a high-end bittersweet from a high-volume mfg (I'm guessing it was Lindt) so you can compare how both vanilla and salt alter the taste of chocolate even more than sugar does. My DH and I have been eating artisanal/high-end chocolates for forty years, but there is nothing quite like Corallo. A truly unique product - once you do this tasting, you will never look at chocolate the same way again. It doesn't "ruin" you for other chocolates, but it makes you aware of how 99.9% of chocolate flavors are manipulated to produce specific flavor profiles. However, this is not cooking chocolate. You cannot just pop Corallo chocolate into a recipe and expect everyone will love it. I wouldn't be certain most recipes would come out properly. Even the texture of his chocolate is different. One of the difficulties in knowing what chocolate to use in today's vs yesterday's recipes is that there are no standards for bittersweet. It didn't exist at the time the chocolate classifications were established at the FDA, so almost anything can be called bittersweet. Bittersweet is an American invention; the Europeans make dark sweet chocolate. A few European chocolatiers have gotten on the "bittersweet" bandwagon but it is still much less popular than in the U.S. Although "generally" bittersweet has a third or less sugar by weight, realistically we have sometimes encountered bittersweet that is almost indistinguishable from European dark sweet, simply because there is no legal classification for it. We have traveled quite a bit around the West since retiring, and almost without exception, we have found that the bittersweet chocolates we love in the Bay Area, really are not popular elsewhere. A notable exception was Kakawa Chocolate House, 1050 East Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM - not their chocolates, which were awful, but their cacao drinks, which are Mayan/Incan in style: served hot, non-sugared, mostly non-dairy. It's as far from Hershey's and Nestle's as one can get. Remarkable stuff; makes you realize why for hundreds of years this type of chocolate drink was a substitute for coffee. Bitter, shockingly intense, it's like drinking espresso. Here is a link that might be useful: BBC video on Claudio Corallo (10 min)

I made Colleen Oz's cake, and it was delicious! I thought something might go or be wrong, because it was too easy - just add the ingredients in order and mix. I thought cake was supposed to be much more persnickity, shall we say, than that, with whipping air into the batter at the right time, and not whipping it at the wrong time, Anyway, I'll be adding that one to my T & T collection. The icing didn't work well, but that was my fault. I was trying to do too many things at once, and it turned out too dry. I just wasn't paying close enough attention to my measuring, and skipped the sifting, and probably over mixed it. Even with doubling, it barely spread across the middle and top of the cake. Other than that, things went fine. Thanks for the recipes! Sally