Nine out of ten times a bad temper is not a good thing. Bad tempers do not equal happiness. The same is true when you're tempering chocolate. You've got to ease the chocolate through the tempering process while maintaining a calm temper yourself. Staying cool is totally worth it when you see and taste the end results. My final work of chocolate art made me quite proud. It also made me gain a few pounds, but I've decided that it's nothing to lose my temper over.
The first item on our chocolate agenda was to glue together our chocolate boxes. With chocolate. Hello Willy Wonka. I opted for a triangle shape since everyone else was making the typical round and rectangle designs.
Please don't confuse my wood grain designed box sides with old school fake wood wall panels. They're pure chocolate, I promise.
As our chocolate glue was drying, we began making fillings for our bon bons. One of my group mates made a delicious maple filling and someone else put together a yummy peanut butter one. My other group mate and I decided to make a raspberry cream filling since that is one of our favorite flavors. The cream turned out perfect and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to make. By the way, there is white chocolate in cream fillings. That's right, the fillings we use to put inside of chocolates have chocolate in them. Crazy, right?
Here's the base coat for the bon bons in a plastic mold.
Your choice of fillings can then be piped in or rolled up into a ball and placed inside and pouring more chocolate on top completes the process. After a few minutes in the refrigerator, the chocolates should pop right out of the mold. If your chocolate has been tempered correctly that is. Thankfully, ours came out like a charm.
And the best looking ones were placed immediately into my chocolate box. Along with the molded pieces, we also dipped pieces of orange ganache in chocolate. These were my favorite! Here's an inside view of the varieties I used:
We also worked a little bit with molding chocolate, which is way harder to work with than marzipan or gum paste. I managed to whip up an okay looking rose for my box lid though.
And Chef P whipped up a chocolate bunny for his granddaughter with all of the leftover chocolate.
Greg and I have had a great time eating all of the chocolate and sharing it with friends this week. It really does taste much better than the cheap stuff you can get at the grocery store check out lanes. Another item that makes a difference in the final taste of an item is below. I used one for the first time this week and was very happy with the results. Does anyone know what this is?
I'll show you where it worked it's magic soon. It's not worth losing your temper over.
Happiness can be hard work. Many would say that having to work hard for something makes you appreciate the end results even more than if something is just given to you. For example, you can stop by your local grocery store or bakery and let your taste buds enjoy the buttery, flaky layers of a croissant in the time it takes you to drive there. Or you can spend the majority of your Sunday mixing up croissant dough, letting it rise, using all of your strength folding European Style Plugra butter into the dough while allowing for chill time in the refrigerator in between rolls,
then REALLY using all of your strength to roll the dough out into one big flat rectangle ( I used my new/very old rolling pin from my Aunt Val’s collection to get the dough really thin),
cutting out triangles,
filling and rolling up the dough, proofing the croissants,
egg washing the tops and finally putting the croissants into a hot oven while thinking about how nice it would be to have a convection oven to bake bread in. Sigh.
But then the happiness arrives…
freshly baked croissants made by yours truly for a snack and dinner and breakfast the next morning! They barely made it to breakfast because we inhaled most of them immediately, but happiness from my hard work is still with me days later. I did manage to make breakfast Sunday morning while the dough was rising, so we did not survive on croissants alone. But I’m pretty sure I could if need be.
I also managed to whip up a small batch of royal icing (aka sugar glue) to finish up my nougatine centerpiece. It was good piping practice for me and makes for a much nicer centerpiece overall.
Continuing with our theme of hard work, let me tell you a little about the world of chocolate. In class on Saturday, we tempered chocolate. While this was not extremely hard work, it does require a lot of patience and a good thermometer. Also, water is chocolate’s worst enemy, so there’s no crying in chocolate making. The bottom line is that chocolate is very fragile and you have to keep it at the right temperatures during the tempering process if you want the end result to give you the happy shine and snap of a good piece of chocolate. My group tempered two batches of milk chocolate and we got it right both times. We used the tabling method to cool the chocolate down.
We made knackerli of all sorts. Ours included a mix of almond slivers, candied hazelnuts and pistachios, dried apricots, bing cherries and currants.
We also cut out large pieces of chocolate for our chocolate boxes that will be completed this weekend. The chocolate is poured onto pieces of acetate and then scored out when it's cooled a bit. I made a wood grain design on my box sides by running a special tool over the milk chocolate and then covering them with dark chocolate. You’ll have to wait until next week to see the final product, but here’s the work in progress.
We’ll be making all kinds of bonbons this weekend and filling up our boxes with them. It would make a lovely Valentine’s Day gift, but unfortunately, the holiday has already passed. I plan on sharing them with my Valentine anyways though. Just look at what he made me for dinner last week.
Homemade pasta and sauce from a local pasta shop that he spruced up with some pancetta and yellow pepper (plus salad and garlic bread). Just looking at these photos brings back happy memories from the meal and our first Hallmark holiday as marrieds. I feel very lucky to have a husband that values hard work in the kitchen (and likes wearing orange aprons) as much as I do.
I think he's holding the knife in case I tried to hijack the making of our dinner. I didn't.
Greg and I received a very nice fruit basket as a wedding gift, but it's a bit too large for the miniature marzipan fruit I made this weekend. So naturally I had to make a nougatine basket centerpiece to display them in.
Nougatine is basically an almond brittle made of glucose (sugar), fondant and almond slivers. It is used to make centerpiece displays that are truly edible - unlike pastillage - which means that I've had to tell Greg "no, you can't eat my work of art" more than once. The nougatine was fairly easy to make, and the real fun comes after you take the sugar mixture off of the stove and began cutting and molding pieces of it while it's still hot. I managed to make something nice and not burn myself, so I was pretty happy. Here is my work of art in process.
The extra pieces of brittle can be reheated and molded again, but the end product gets a little darker every time you heat it up so it's not a great option. Once I had all of my pieces ready to go, I glued them together with some very hot caramel.
And then it was time to go to the market for some fruit. Or in my case, sculpt a few pieces of fruit out of marzipan. Marzipan is very similar to the gum paste we used to make flowers a few weeks ago, but it is a little drier and tougher to work with. I had fun making my mini colorful fruit though.
The lemon is my personal favorite.
It's another fun project that is now sitting on our mantle. At least the fruit won't rot.
I would like to finish up the edges with some royal icing sometime soon, but this is how it stands for now. Hopefully Greg won't eat chunks off of it while I'm not looking. He can, however, eat chunks of my upcoming projects because we are moving on to chocolate next week...and I am really excited about it!
To give myself a head start on the world of chocolate, I made some very dense and chocolatey brownies from a recipe book Greg gave me for Christmas.
These brownies were hand delivered to my family in Fort Wayne over the weekend and nuts were added to one side especially for my Aunt Val. I'm happy to say that they were devoured by all.
My final note of happiness is to wish everyone a Happy Valentine's Day! These flowers are for you from me. Well, actually they were from Greg to me last week, but since they're still in bloom I figure I can share them with you via my blog. I hope you receive all of the candy, teddy bears and flowers that your heart desires and your house can hold. If not, you can always make a nougatine basket to put them in.
Indianapolis received a taste of the NFL this past week while hosting its first Super Bowl. There were the standard football players, celebrities, traffic, crowds and beer drinking on the streets that you would see at any Super Bowl, but what I enjoyed most was the great vibrancy in the city that made me proud to live here and soak in the fun. I volunteered at the NFL Experience a few days and will continue to wear my super scarf proudly for years to come; however, the event I'm most proud of participating in is the "Taste of the NFL" charity event this weekend at Gleaner's Food Bank. It was the first time the $600 ticket event has been held on site at the benefiting food bank and I think it helped make even more of an impact on all of the chefs volunteering their time and the many cocktail attire attendees. I was in The Chef's Academy pastry booth with my Chefs from school and we had one of the favorite displays of the night. Let me show you why. First, there was the pastillage centerpiece with chocolate abstract Lombardi trophy on top.
Then there was the second chocolate display complete with an edible football.
But it was really the desserts themselves that stole all of the attention.
We lined up rows and rows of petit fours on a large mirror at our booth. There were four delicious varieties including (in lament terms): a New York style cheesecake with chocolate mousse, a strawberry shortcake flavored cake, a sachertorte complete with raspberry jam, and my favorite: a white chocolate mousse hazelnut crunch variety with real gold leaf on top and a short dough crust on the bottom. It was definitely the fan favorite of the night as well. One of the Colts Alumni players at our booth had four pieces.
While I didn't make the beautiful cakes, I did help plate and serve them to approximately 3,000 guests. We eventually had to serve pieces from the mirror display and actually turn guests away at the end of the night when service was supposed to stop and we were trying to clear the table. The evening flew by and it was a ton of fun, plus I got to work with my favorite chefs. Here I am with the fabulously French Chef Pierre.
I know what you're thinking. You want to see pictures of celebrities. While there were plenty of chefs, celebrities, and football players I didn't know in attendance, I did see a few famous foodie folks that you may know. Ted Allen from "Chopped" was the host of the event and he seemed very friendly and down to earth. Also, two stars from the "Cake Boss" were on site and made a special cake for the event. I didn't see the boss men themselves, but I did snap a photo of their cake while it was being stored in the large freezer room.
That is all edible. It was crazy to see up close - the jerseys looked so real that I almost stomped on the Brady one, but I managed to hold it together and backed away from the cake.
Greg and I also saw several celebrities downtown during the week. We spotted Jimmy Fallon doing an interview with Al Roker from the Today Show. There were several hosts of various ESPN shows and countless football players. I did snap a photo of a local sports icon who was on hand for the Super 46 sandwich contest rally in Super Bowl Village. Blue II - the Butler Bulldog mascot with taste buds of slobber!
I was also lucky enough to get a picture with the winner of the Super 46 sandwich contest, Fritz from the Schnitzelbank Restaurant in Jasper, IN. Here he is ready to squirt mustard on a brat-covered soft pretzel.
And what better to wash down the sandwich with than a special Super Bowl edition Bud Light? You may question this decision, but this souvenir gave us the experience of walking around the streets of Indy with a beer in our hands and no one to stop us. And it's all about the experience right? Yeah, in this case it was because the beer tasted like water.
To make up for this bad judgment call, I ended the weekend with my new favorite winter treat - Rumchata.
For more celebrity sightings, I recommend browsing a gossip site. For more delicious baked goods, I recommend coming here next week. I'll be back in the kitchen with new tastes soon.
