I’d like you all to know that this is my first blog post on my NEW (to me) laptop! My brother Jason is serving a mission for our church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (aka the Mormons) and he can’t use any of this new fangled technology ;) (You can check out his Mission Blog with his weekly letters HERE.) So I get his old laptop! YAY!
SO.
Who’s ready for the final week of chocolate candies?!?!?
I know, You are! (Why else would you be here? I mean, quite honestly…) Now, let’s remember my warning about drooling, get that towel ready and off we go!!
We started off verrrry nicely. We made a peanut butter filling. I KNOW! I was sooooo excited. The finished product is reeeeeaallly good. (jealous?) It was called peanut butter pavé(pah-VEH). Fancy huh? I know. We casted it into a frame like we did with the ganaches. I don’t actually know why this one is a pavé and the others were ganaches. Sorry. We then made a filling for Swiss Rochers (roh-SHEHS). Kinda like Ferrero Rochers (isn’t that what they’re called??). But better.
One of the cool things about these were that we had to temper the entire mixture, not just the chocolate, on the table. MmMmmMmmmm….peanut butter and chocolate. A match made in heaven.
I’ll come back to these, I promise.
We also made a treat called royaltine (ROY-yal-teen). Large crepe companies have little crispy scraps that they package up and sell. One company calls it royaltine, hence the candy’s name. We mixed it with milk chocolate and hazelnut praliné (prah-lee-NEH), which is half and half hazelnut paste and sugar. OH MY GOODNESS that stuff was good. It’s competing for favorite with the gianduja from last week. The royaltine is definitely gone already. YUM. After we mixed it, we spooned it onto a silpat to set. The ultimate no bake ;) And I’m done with the poo jokes. JUST so you know…
Do you remember the little hazelnut trios from last week? We hand dipped those into chocolate and once they set, they were all done!
Okay, so back to the Swiss Rochers. We cut the filling that we casted into squares and then rolled those into little balls. We covered them in chocolate and then coated them with pralinettes – PRAH-lih-NETS (chopped almonds coated in sugar) Can you see them hiding? ;) Once they set and the pralinettes stuck, we covered them in chocolate. I mean, of course, right?
We learned how to dip candies by practicing with nougatine (NOO-guh-teen) and the trios, so then we hand dipped our creamy from normandy ganache and we got to use TRANSFER SHEETS! I love transfer sheets. They are designs printed off in cocoa butter (amazing, right?) and when you place it on wet chocolate, the cocoa butter is transferred on during the crystallization (setting) process. You take off the plastic backing, and the design stays on!! There are companies that will create transfer sheets for you, with your design or logo, or whatever. It’s really neat. The school has sheets with their logo of course. You’ll see it later. ;) We got to try all sorts of cool designs: 
Once they were allowed to set overnight, we could take off the plastic backing and admire our handiwork!
Pretty cool huh? LOVE IT!
So Wednesday was the big enrobing day. The school has this awesome chocolate tempering machine that you can attach an enrobing machine to. Here is Chef Josh explaining how to use it: 
It took a lot of organizing, but we all got to use the machine. We would put transfer sheets onto the different flavors for easy recognition.
Peanut Butter got a texture, rather than a transfer sheet. I thought it looked like snake skin…*shivers*. But that certainly did not stop me from eating them. OH no :) 
Once all the candies were enrobed, they had to set overnight. On Thursday we packaged everything. We had a huge assembly line going all the way around the kitchen to get all the candies in their little boxes.
We put the truffles, almonds and Swiss Rochers into little bags with ribbon
And that was chocolate candies! The school kept a lot of the candies we made to give out for school functions. I can be like “Hey, I made that!” and the rest we took home. I gave John all our Tea and Coffee flavored ones to give away at work. AND I managed to do some trading to get extra rochers. hee hee.
Is that the end of chocolate for me? OH no. This next week is chocolate sculpture! We’ve already started, but I’d rather keep you in suspense. Cuz it’s gonna be cool.
I know, I’m so mean, aren’t I? ;)
4 comments:
Ah, so so so awesome! I've always wondered how chocolates got those cool designs on them!
Again LOVE your commentary and now I have to go and squeeze out my towel ;)
You weren't kidding about the drooling thing!
cool patterns
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