Dark chocolate to milk chocolate with almonds

I had picked up this brick of baking chocolate at fresh & easy when I was in SD. They had a milk chocolate with almonds there, and it was good for straigt up eating. The dark chocolate was definitely baking chocolate. It needing a little more sugar, I decided that I as just going to experiment. The chocolate was dirt cheap, so I didn't even bother reading information online. I decided to just go for it.

And what do you know, working with chocolate is actually takes some knowledge and experience with the product.

First things first, you cannot add sugar to melted chocolate. I roasted the raw almonds in peanut oil and set that aside. That itself was pretty tasty after it had rested a bit.

I set up my double boiler, and when the chocolate melted, I decided to add some sugar. After giving it more than enough time to mix into the chocolate, I decided the sugar wasn't ever going to mix into the dark chocolate. So all I had left was melted dark chocolate with gritty sugar in my double boiler. I imagined the tasted to be something unplesant. I did remember that Alton Brown from Good Eats saying you can't do this or that with chocolate. And maybe adding sugar was one of them. I had raw sugar, and that didn't do anything either. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, I now had raw sugar and white sugar grittyness in my melted dark chocolate. Maybe it needed some liquid to mix the sugar in? So I decided to add some Hazlenut non daily creamer. And it instantly had a chemical reaction and turned into a solid.

I admit defeat and put the solid into a zip lock bag. The next day, I decided to dissolve the solid into boiling milk. I was hoping to boil out the milk as everything seemed to be dissolving fine into the liquid. But unfortunately it wasn't ever going to return to a solid state. But what I did end up with was pretty good fudge. Unfortunately, I don't like fudge, but I was happy that I was able to turn something that I thought would have been thrown out into something commonly consumable.

It turns out that if you want to turn dark chocolate into milk chocolate, you have to use sweetened condensed milk. If you want to turn baking chocolate to sweet dark chocolate, you need to use chocolate liquor. And you can add other things to enhance the flavor or chocolate.

Overall, it wasn't a complete waste. And I did buy the brick of chocolate for $2 primarily to play with it. I'll just eat the rest as is. Its not too bad. Maybe I'll go get some sweeted condensed milk if I have some left over.