Well dear readers, I'm going to confess something to you. I'm having a really hard time getting into the Christmas spirit. I was ready to go since September and then my business launch projects and a few personal setbacks got the better of my "christmast-sy" spirit. I don't even have the beginning of an idea for my Christmas log, I'm telling you! Despite everything, I love the result of today's recipe so much that I couldn't wait to share it with you.

You may have seen on Christelle's blog: Once Upon a Time Pastry the superb Halloween chocolate tablets made with molds from the brand Artesil? It's a French brand that manufactures thermoformed chocolate molds, you can even have your own personalized molds made.

I really loved the Halloween molds. I had in the back of my mind the idea of trying to fill the imprints with candy melt to give even more pizzazz and really highlight the patterns. So I contacted the Artesil team who kindly agreed to send me a sample of their Christmas collection.

So I received the following 3 molds:

And I tested my candy melt idea:

For those who don't know, candy melt is a sort of colored white chocolate in pellet form. It's quite practical for making decorations without overthinking it. For example, it's what we use for coating cake pops. It's quite easy to work with, you just need to melt the pellets and use the chocolate as is. No need to color or temper it.

I tried several methods to fill the imprints cleanly and the simplest is clearly to use a toothpick. Just take a little melted candy melt and gently place it on the area you want to color. You have to go slowly but nothing complicated. You do the same thing for all the colors and let it dry for at least an hour in the fridge.

For the rest of the tablet, I opted for dark chocolate. I took supermarket chocolate but I really should have taken couverture chocolate (that said the final result is very good).

I thought that with the course I took at Lenôtre to learn how to temper chocolate it would go smoothly but actually it's really complicated to do at home. I made 400 g of chocolate but it's really the minimum and it was too little. So I'm going to avoid giving you advice because I don't feel comfortable with this subject yet but I'll let you find the different methods to temper chocolate at Christelle's.

My tempering wasn't great and yet I'm ultra-fan of the result:

So I recommend not overthinking the tempering and especially not let this apprehension prevent you from getting started because it's a super gift for really cheap to please your family and friends!