As my four loyal readers may have noticed, this blog has been non-updating for quite some time. Sorry about that. Anyway, I’m back, and I have been taking pictures, and I will post them on the internet (with possibly not that much text), appropriately post-dated and tagged ‘Things That Are Not Late’. You know how I do. But let’s not dwell on the past.
Today was the first day of chocolate.
I can now temper chocolate.
So, first, I would just like to say that the world of chocolate is a weird world. I began my day with a chocolate tasting. Afterwards, we watching an instructional video that starred a hot-pink, dancing clip-art beta crystal and two young men typing away very intently on mid-90′s laptops, which ran what appeared to be DOS. Last night, as homework, I read an article by a woman who literally gave her job title as Quality Control Officer and Tasting Panelist for X- Chocolaterie. My chef spent the day singing Big Band-era show tunes about chocolate and doing Julia Child impressions. (Ok, the behavior described in the last sentence is, admittedly, not that unusual. But still. It added to the overall carnival atmosphere.)
OK, yes, this is ugly and kind of boring to look at. But it’s chocolate that I tempered myself, for the first time, without messing up horribly. For the non-specialists among you, what this means is that you heat up chocolate, then cool it down, then heat it up again and stir it a little. If you do this, you end up with chocolate that dries shiny and does not melt when you touch it. (It obviously will melt eventually, if you hold it long enough, but you know, not when you convey it from the plate to your mouth. It will hold for that long.) This is the first step towards being able to make my own truffles, bonbons, molded chocolate bunny rabbits, etc.
Also, as kind of an educational experiment, rather than, you know, something you would actually want to do in the real world, we are making chocolate from scratch. This giant pile of ground-up brown goo that appears to be dripping from the end of a meat grinder? Just all part of the magic.
This is a long post, longer than I like to write (it puts too much pressure on me the next time around, plus I think the writing can start to drag). But it was a big day. Stay with me here.
After class, after chocolate, I volunteered to help with a demonstration put on by Ron Ben-Israel. Click that link by the way. The man is a genius with a sugar flower. Anwyay, I helped make this.
Sorry about the picture smallness. I did not take this photo because I was busy cleaning up after I, with only the minimal supervision of one master chef, 2 other students, and a roomful of audience members, molded and glued on several pieces of fondant all by myself.
In conclusion, booyah.
Blurry, but an ugly (if fairly delicious) cake anyway.
Much better.
Basically, the top tier of a wedding cake. Made with a white cake sponge, filled with butter cream, and covered with a pastel fondant. Useful practice, but not that exciting.
