I was a private pilot (still am technically) and the brotherhood of pilots is nothing short of amazing. I am getting that same feeling from the Chocolate life and the people making chocolate. It is Sunday m,owning, I fire out a question and people rush to help and spread their knowledge. I love the people and thee chocolate!! Thank you for your help. Makes perfect sense!

Hi Jim, the starch in the powdered sugar makes the chocolate swell up and thicken, which makes it hard to work with amongst other issues. I have used a Blendtec blender to pre grind sugar to some degree, but it does not get it very fine in the blender before the sugar starts to get sticky due to the heat build up from friction. So basically you can do a quick pre grind of the sugar but your chocolate will not have that silky smooth texture. A melanger seems to be the only solution I have found to get the smooth texture. FYI, the reason the powdered sugar has additives in it is to keep it from caking up. It is rumored that you can get powdered sugar from Europe or Canada without additives, but I have spent hours researching that and so far none has been found.

Careful with powder sugar...many times it isnt just sugar....it has corn starch, flour and calcium phoshpate, of course you could grind your own to get around that problem...

There seems to be lots of discussion about pulverizing the sugar before adding it to the chocolate liqueur. Is there some reason powdered sugar is not used?

updated by @jim-cameron: 04/29/15 08:04:45