Three trays polished, the melter warming — how much couverture goes in?
Cavity weight times cavities times trays is what the molds hold; the working buffer on top is what tempering demands, and this page keeps the two apart so the leftover goes back to the tub on paper the way it does at your bench. Everything stays in your browser.
The temper
The day
The numbers here are yours to check. This page does arithmetic on what you type — it cannot see your recipe, your equipment or your batch.
For anything you will eat or sell as food, double-check it against your own process and your local rules. This page does maths, not food safety.
Want it to remember?
In MadeKeeper the make consumes only the molded weight while the buffer books straight back into your couverture inventory, and the cost per bonbon cascades into the price of every box you sell. See for cottage food makers or poke around the live demo. $19/mo for the whole back office, kept for as long as you stay. The shop stays free for cost a piece and one fair — no product cap. The tax packet, Etsy and Square, and more fairs are the $19.
Free tool — no signup
A melt weight, a buffer, and the accounting question hiding underneath — the same sums chocolatiers keep in personal spreadsheets next to the mold maker's cavity weights. The math below is exactly what the calculator runs, in the open.
How much chocolate should I melt for my molds?
Multiply the mold's per-cavity weight by cavities per tray, then by trays, and add a working buffer on top — the shorthand that gets passed around the forums is 'multiply by 1.25 and retemper the rest.' Three trays of 24 at 10 g a cavity is 720 g of molded chocolate, so you melt 900 g and expect about 180 g back in the tub. Most mold makers publish the per-cavity gram weight for each mold; if yours doesn't, fill one cavity, scrape it clean, and weigh the piece.
Why is the buffer 25% — and why is it a setting instead of a rule?
Because you can't temper too small a mass — by the time you've filled, scraped, and capped, there has to be enough workable chocolate left in the bowl — so everyone melts more than the molds hold. How much more is genuinely argued: it depends on your method and your melter, and someone hand-tempering on a slab works with a different cushion than someone whose tabletop machine holds the mass for her. We default to 25% because 'times 1.25' is the convention the craft actually passes around, but it's your setting — dial it to what your own setup needs.
Does the leftover chocolate count as a cost of the batch?
No — and it's the easiest number in a costing spreadsheet to get wrong. The buffer isn't consumed: it comes out of the melter, goes back in the tub, and gets retempered next time, so the batch only used the 720 g actually sitting in cavities. Cost the melt weight instead of the molded weight and every bonbon quietly carries an extra 25% — in the example, the batch consumed $10.08 of couverture, not the $12.60 you melted.
What does each bonbon cost in chocolate?
Cavity weight at your per-kilo couverture price: a 10 g cavity at $14 a kilo is 14 cents of chocolate in every piece. That's the chocolate alone — ganache, colored cocoa butter, boxes, and your time all stack on top before it becomes a price. Treat it as the floor the rest of your pricing stands on, not the price itself.