I love those old-fashioned fruit-jelly chocolates, especially orange flavoured. These are with candied melon, much easier than home-made fruit-jelly.

Experiments with candied fruit

I love those old-fashioned fruit-jelly chocolates, especially orange flavoured. Fruit-jelly is too daunting for me to make from scratch. So this is completely faking it – and experimental into the bargain. I got the candied fruit at the market – they have all sorts, pineapple and papaya probably being the best sellers but I thought they would be too sweet. I took home some melon, lemon, and some candied cherries as well. Those turned out not to taste too great, but the melon was really nice, some tartness but sweet at the same time.

Production time

I cut up the melon and lemon strips into cubes of about 5 mm. Mixed those into some melted chocolate, and formed that into a rough slab. After cooling, I cut this into straight edged squares, about 16. Those I quickly enrobed in the melted chocolate. Cutting the finished chocolate in half, it has this surprising stained-glass structure. The taste is great – not as sweet or soft as some jellies, the fruit has enough tartness left to make a good combination with the dark chocolate, I think.
Next time I could try using thin strips instead of the cubes, and see if I can make a little less jumbled slab, with regular spaced little squares showing in the cross-section.
(update: see my Christmas Chocolates post for a white chocolate and papaya variant that looks like stained glass)