About Chocolate Recipes Tin

You have read a hundred of these

You’re right to assume we’ll say the same thing every other site says: *‘tested, foolproof, trusted.’* Most of them mean it for about five minutes, until the first reader emails to say the sauce curdled or the chocolate seizes. We don’t stop testing when it works once.

We stop when it works *every* time—even when the humidity spikes, the oven runs hot, or you forgot to temper the eggs.

The difference isn’t in the words. It’s in the burn marks on the stovetop, the charred edges of the baking sheets, and the three failed batches we throw out before a recipe ever goes live. That’s the cost of doing it right. The rest is just noise.

If you’ve ever melted chocolate and watched it turn into a greasy sludge, or baked a cake that collapsed like a soufflé gone wrong, you know what happens when recipes aren’t tested like they should be. We don’t pretend that won’t happen here. We make sure it *doesn’t*.

Anyone can write that they test things

Every recipe starts with a written method, then gets made four times—once by me, twice by someone else, and once under ‘worst-case’ conditions (think: a kitchen at 90°F, a stovetop with uneven heat, or a mixer that’s seen better decades).

If the fourth batch fails, we go back to the drawing board. No shortcuts. No ‘close enough.’

We track temperature swings, resting times, and the exact moment chocolate starts to seize. If a step feels ambiguous—*‘bake until a toothpick comes out clean’*—we replace it with a timer and a specific internal temp.

Because the only thing worse than a bad recipe is one that pretends to be foolproof.

And yes, that means some recipes take longer to write than they do to cook.

But if you’ve ever spent an hour scraping burnt sugar off a pan because the instructions said *‘caramelise’* without telling you to watch the colour, you’ll understand why we’d rather spend a week getting it right than five minutes getting it *almost* there.

About the author

Sheldon Carmichael is the founder and editor of *Chocolate Recipes Tin*, where he turns kitchen failures into lessons and family traditions into recipes.

The one time we broke our own rules was with a chocolate mousse recipe that kept splitting, no matter how slow we whipped the eggs.

We scrapped it, rewrote it from scratch, and ended up using a double boiler instead of a heat bath—because the rule isn’t *‘no shortcuts’* if the shortcut is what’s making it fail. The lesson? Even we have to admit when we’re wrong.

This will not be right for everyone

If you’re looking for recipes that treat your kitchen like a lab—where every variable is controlled, every ingredient is specialty-grade, and every step assumes you have an hour to spare—this isn’t the place.

We write for the rest of us: the people who cook with what’s on hand, who don’t own a thermometer, who’ve ever burned a batch of cookies because the oven ‘runs hot.’

Close this page now if you want perfection. Stay if you want something that actually works in the kitchen you’ve got, with the tools you’ve got, and the time you’ve got. The rest is just noise.

You could just be told what you want to hear

We could say we only use the finest cocoa, or that our methods are ‘time-tested,’ or that every recipe is ‘a labour of love.’ But those are easy words, and we’d rather show you the burn marks on the stovetop, the three failed batches we threw out, and the exact temperature we set the oven to—even if it means admitting when we got it wrong.

If there’s something else you’d rather we wrote about—or something we’re missing—tell us on the contact page.