Debra Fritz wrote:
I'm going to chill the ganache/filling before filling the shells at
room temp overnight...which will also take care of potential
condensation problems...and I will be careful about the temp of the
chocolate... Should it also be at 86F for the initial filling of the
molds?

I think you are going to have a problem here. It is this: in order to fill
the shells smoothly, the filling must be sufficiently runny to smooth out to
some degree, either on its own, or with the help of some moderate sideways
shaking or table tapping by you. It should then firm up sufficiently to
allow you to cover the back. If you let the filling sit overnight or chill
it before putting it in the shells, you will have to melt it all over again
in order to achieve a state that is liquid enough to fill the shells. So
what you want to do is make the filling, keep an eye on it until it cools
sufficiently (ie, under the melting point of chocolate) and then immediately
fill the shells. The easiest way is generally to us a disposable plastic
icing cone.

The chocolate should be within the working temperature specified for it.
With my equipment, though, I generally find that keeping it at the lowest
end of that range works best. When I was hand tempering, that was not
generally the case. You'll find what works best by trial and error.

By the way, I though I had posted something earlier, but it never appeared.
In it, I said that the cheap, bendable molds were much harder to work with
than the more expensive rigid professional molds. If you really get into
this, you might want to spring for a couple of good molds. you can get them
on the web at Chocolat-Chocolat and JB Prince, amongst other places.
(Zillions of sites carry the cheap molds, which are usually used by people
who use candy melts to make their "chocolates.")

I'm still looking for a basic "white butter cream" filling that I can
play with for color/flavor, if you happen to know of one, other than
ganache.

Thank you for all your help.

Debra

I don't use that kind of filling, but you can find the ingredients for it,
and probably recipes, at www.sugarcraft.com.