Suppose I want to make a bar of bittersweet chocolate (or semi-sweet or milk chocolate, for that matter). Can it be made with baking cocoa? Does it require special appliances/tools/hard-to-get ingredients? Does anyone have a recipe?
Not only a recipe but a complete demonstration from eGullet. Home-made chocolate.
In a double boiler, melt semi-sweet chocolate and then stir in an equal part of shaved unsweetened chocolate? 
Wow. A grinder, a food processor, a grinding wheel thing, stuff I’ve never seen in a store (cocoa butter, lecithin), three days… I didn’t think it would be such a process! I thought you could spoon out some cocoa powder from a tin, mix some sugar and butter or something, and pur it into a mould.
Well, that’s if you want to make your own chocolate from cocoa beans. Do you just want to make a bar in a special shape or something? If so, I believe that can be done more simply. I haven’t done it – I hope that someone else who has will come along soon – but I think you should be able to take a bar of bittersweet chocolate, melt it and temper it (you can find instructions for tempering chocolate online, but my favorite is in Shirley Corriher’s Cookwise), and then pour it into the mold.
You probably could make chocolate from cocoa powder, cocoa butter, sugar, and maybe a couple of other ingredients, but it seems like it would be only a little less arduous than making it from scratch. As far as I know, anyway.
I think I’ll just continue to buy my chocolate bars!
[QUOTE=stargazer]
Do you just want to make a bar in a special shape or something?.. I think you should be able to take a bar of bittersweet chocolate, melt it…QUOTE]
I bought some locally-made bittersweet and semi-sweet chocolate a few weeks ago at a tea & spice shop. It was a lot better than commercially-made ones. I thought it would be fun to try making it myself, once it’s back on the diet.
This sounds like a lot less trouble.