Back to the thing about chocolate-coating cookies... I followed the recipe the first time. It says to use 6 ounces of semi-sweet baking chocolate, melted, with 4 teaspoons of shortening. I dipped the cookies when they were completely cool - even cold, since I did it in winter, and had a window open in the room while I was working, to help the chocolate set faster. This was an absolute disaster. I ended up with mess. The chocolate simply WOULD NOT set up, no matter that I left them overnight in a cool room. (I don't like to refrigerate chocolate 'coating,' since the moisture in my fridge can cause a 'mist' of moisture on the cookies.) I tried refrigerating them, despite my scruples about that, and the chocolate coating was STILL tacky when they came out of the fridge. It got soft and gooey again and never hardened up. I needed to transport them, so I stacked them in single layers with parchment between each layer. (Waxed paper is not a universal kitchen supply; it doesn't exist in the country where I live. There is a shiny 'sandwich-wrapping' paper, but it isn't waxed.) I stored them in the fridge this way overnight. Within a two hours, when the box was opened, there was a mess because the chocolate coating was sticking to the paper, to people's fingers, and was soft and gooey on the cookies. The next time I used the recipe, I did not use the vegetable fat. When I made hand-dipped chocolates, we didn't add vegetable fat, just used high-quality chocolate. I figured if the chocolate was hard in the bar on the shelf, it would eventually harden on the cookies. It did firm up much better, but it was still tacky and likely to come off on people's fingers. I have a hard time believing that ganache - even a thick one, like we use for truffle centers - would not be too soft for the kind of hard chocolate coating I'm trying to get. I want something that will allow me to put the cookies out on a plate at room temperature, and not have the chocolate coating left behind on the plate when someone picks up a cookie. And of course, I want to be able to store the dipped cookies. I can't have five dozen cookies laid out in a single layer on my countertop. But that seems to be the only way to store cookies with a chocolate coating. How do the pros get chocolate-coated cookies to have a firm chocolate coating? There's got to be a secret out there. Hi Nel, The firm coating with 'snap' to it is tempered chocolate. This means the crystals in the chocolate are aligned and the chocolate sets up to a firm shiny coat. The easiest way to temper chocolate is to melt slowly 3/4 of the chocolate you are using, then take it off the heat, add the last 1/4 and stir gently until it is melted. A few small unmelted chunks is fine. If you can dip the tip of a knife into the chocolate and it sets to a firm hard coat in less than 1 minute, you are good to go. Hope this helps. Happy Baking! MaryJane @ The Baker's Hotline

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