Can you make unsweetened chocolate sweet

View our disclosure. Working on a recipe that calls for semi-sweet baking chocolate? Semi-sweet baking chocolate is well-suited to just about any baking application.

Chop it up, and use it in cookies. Melt it down and add it to a pie, or use it to make candy. It contains lots of cocoa butter, so it melts easily and smoothly. One bar of semi-sweet baking chocolate contains four ounces. Since your recipe may call for more, or less, than a full bar, these substitutes replace one ounce of chocolate as written.

Just scale them up or down to meet your needs. Replace the semi-sweet chocolate called for with an equal amount of bittersweet chocolate. Combine one ounce of unsweetened baking chocolate and one Tablespoon of sugar, and use in place of one ounce of semi-sweet chocolate. This will maintain the proper sweetness in your recipe, while giving you a chocolate that melts well. Chocolate chips contain less cocoa butter, plus added stabilizers, to help them maintain their chip shape when you bake them.

Whip up a quick semi-sweet chocolate substitute by combining three Tablespoons of cocoa powder, three Tablespoons of sugar and one Tablespoon of butter or your favorite oil. This will get the proper chocolate flavor, sweetness and fat into your recipe. This substitute works well in baked goods, but is not suitable for candy making.

If the unsweetened chocolate you've got isn't portioned in 1-ounce squares, you'll need to use a kitchen scale or just eyeball it, based on the weight and size of the whole bar.

When you're measuring out your chocolate and sugar for the recipe, it's pretty likely you'll look at the sugar in your mixing bowl and ask yourself "Do I really need that much?

Sugar isn't just a sweetener, it's a structural ingredient in baked goods: Imagine you're building a brick wall, and decide to cut back on the mortar. Try your recipe the way it's written the first time, and then — once you know the texture and flavor you're shooting for — experiment with cutting back on the sugar.

Some recipes are pretty forgiving and others are not, so you'll never know until you try. Fred Decker is a trained chef, former restaurateur and prolific freelance writer, with a special interest in all things related to food and nutrition.

His work has appeared online on major sites including Livestrong. Compare and Contrast Although they're both chocolate, unsweetened and semi-sweet varieties have a few important differences. Convert to Semi-Sweet Unsweetened chocolate is really, really bitter, so it takes more sugar than you might imagine to make the equivalent of semi-sweet. Caution: If making chocolate cake, brownies, or any other intensely chocolate-flavored baked good, do not replace all of the chocolate with cocoa powder; it will have a drastic effect on the texture.

These are pure chocolates to which sugar, vanilla, and emulsifiers have been added. The terms themselves are not surefire indicators of relative sweetness. They can be freely interchanged in most recipes, but expect variations in flavor.

Caution: Unsweetened chocolate is starchier than sweetened chocolate, so while this substitution will work well with fudgy brownies, it could wreak havoc on a delicate custard or an airy cake.