It bloomed

Fat bloom

Cocoa butter migrating to the surface and recrystallizing there, usually because the chocolate was poorly tempered or because it was stored through temperature swings that partly melted and reset it. It looks like a soft gray film and the chocolate feels slightly greasy.

Sugar bloom

Moisture condensing on the surface, dissolving some sugar, then evaporating and leaving sugar crystals behind. It looks grittier and drier than fat bloom and the usual cause is taking cold chocolate into a warm room, or a genuinely damp store room.

Telling them apart

Rub it. Fat bloom softens and disappears under a warm finger; sugar bloom stays gritty. That takes a second and it points at completely different fixes, so it is worth doing before concluding anything.

Neither is a safety problem

Bloomed chocolate is safe and tastes mostly fine, and it looks like a defect to a buyer, which for a gift product is the same thing. There is no recovering the surface short of remelting and retempering.

The fixes are different

Fat bloom says fix the temper or fix the storage temperature. Sugar bloom says fix the humidity and stop moving product between temperatures without letting it equilibrate sealed. Both are storage specifications rather than recipe changes.

It often appears after it leaves you

A warm delivery, a shop window, a customer’s fridge. That makes a conservative storage line on the package worth the space, and it makes the retained sample from each batch the only way to know whether the product left you right.

Let it equilibrate sealed

Moving chocolate between temperatures is the usual cause of sugar bloom, and the fix is to let it reach the new temperature while still sealed so that condensation forms on the package rather than on the product. That single habit prevents most of it, in your store room and in the customer’s kitchen if you print it.

References