Crimson/Plum: Chocolate Tales

Piece, Love, & Chocolate

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Jul 2014 01:15:00 +0000

I was in Boulder, CO recently for a conference, and while there I found what I think is my favorite chocolate shop I've been to yet. It's the closest I've seen to what I would want if I finally gave up on grad school and opened my own chocolate shop:

Piece, Love, & Chocolate

Unfortunately, I didn't have my camera on me, and they don't seem to have any photos of the shop on their website. Which is a shame, because it's quite lovely. Probably a little more hippie than I would lean with the decoration, but it is Boulder. But it had loads more personality than most chocolate shops I've been in!

Then, of course, there was the chocolate. There's a counter with an array of pastries as well as a long line of truffles, a revolving cake display, and a menu of chocolate beverages. Then opposite the counter is the retail area - in the back, they have their own line of chocolate bars (with real examples of each framed on the wall, which was a cute touch), and next to that a wall covered in an array of truly high-end chocolate bars, probably the best collection I've ever seen. You won't find any Ghirardelli here - I don't think I even saw the higher-end grocery store brands like Scharffen Berger or Green & Black. Start with Vosges and Valrhona, then work your way up in price from there. The selection was dizzying!

Along the next wall you'll find even better goodies for the hobby chocolatier - an array of couverture discs, cocoa nibs, cocoa butter, cocoa powder, etc, in bulk baggies. Not things you find in most chocolate shops I've been to! Next to that, some savory chocolate items, such as chocolate pasta or cocoa-infused olive oil. On the floor between all this are shelves piled high with a variety of packaged tasties both from the shop's own brand and other small chocolatiers.

The truffle selection in the counter display was lovely. So many independent chocolate shops I go to have a huge selection, but it's the same 150 things you find everywhere. Worse yet, much of it looks mass-produced and possibly even made with "candy coating"instead of real chocolate. Not so here. They have a lineup of a few dozen flavors, and it's clear that each one was made in small batches with attention to detail. They do sell a few other companies' products here, but most are made in-house. And the flavors range from the expected to the hard-to-find, such as Blood Orange or Bakhti Chai.

Sadly, we didn't try any of the truffles. We'd just finished dinner and decided to focus our limited stomach space on the pastries. My husband got a slice of their huge chocolate layer cake, while I got a caramel and sea salt "cookie torte" - two chocolate cookies dipped in ganache, with a layer of caramel mousse in between. We also each got a mug of sipping chocolate; mine with cinnamon, his with mint.

I had seen a package of the sipping chocolate for sale, so I knew it was 85%, but apparently this fact didn't make an impression until after I'd tasted it. It really is 85% dark! I'm more of a 70% girl myself, so I put a couple packets of sugar in mine - if you can do that to coffee, you can totally do it to hot chocolate, right? (The cinnamon probably added a bit of extra bitterness.) It was incredibly thick and rich, though, even more than I was expecting. We brought leftovers home in travel cups and the next day it was just as good, if not better, eaten with a spoon after it had thickened in the fridge.

The cake was great. The mousse layer was also a smidge less sweet than I was expecting from it, but still delicious. The cake itself was dense, and the frosting was thick and fudgy. But I have to say that my cookie torte was my favorite. The caramel and sea salt mousse was amazing (and, in fact, I found that I liked it mixed with the thickened sipping chocolate...), and there was just the right amount of it to smear on the cookies without overwhelming them.

So basically: These people are serious about dark chocolate. More than you might be expecting when you place an order, but that's not a bad thing. Just a surprise!

One last touch that my husband and I loved (in fact, he just came and reminded me that I had to mention it - like I would forget a thing like this): For $20, you can buy a huge three-dimensional chocolate (about 10" long and 5" diameter) molded into the shape of a cocoa bean. There are a million things in here to buy for a chocolate-loving friend, but that might be the ultimate chocoholic gift.

I am so excited to have found this place, and I'll be making a beeline the next time I'm up in Boulder. In fact, given our family's biannual trips to Denver, I may have to find my way up to Boulder just to come back! I just hope that next time I come with an emptier stomach and plenty of spending money.

(I'll be sure to bring a camera next time, too...)

Ghirardelli bittersweet chips now at Costco

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 01:26:00 +0000

I'm so excited! Costco now carries Ghirardelli Bittersweet chips - 3.5 lbs for only $10!

These are our go-to for candymaking, especially at Christmas when we make tons of chocolates for our families. It's rare to find them for less than $2.50 per 11 oz bag ($3.63/lb), and the cheapest I've ever seen them - only once or twice - is $2/bag ($2.91/lb). $2.85/lb is an excellent price for a very tasty chocolate that melts well for dipping and candymaking. And big bags are perfect when you're making as much as we do for the holidays!

Happy Halloween! Chocolate/Pumpkin Swirl Bread

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 22:24:00 +0000

I think pumpkin and chocolate are a massively underused flavor combo, so I wanted to correct that this Halloween. It doesn't hurt that the orange-and-black (well, dark brown) swirls are very in season!

The stars of our show:

I based it on recipes from the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook (one of my all-around faves). For the chocolate bread, I used the Nut Bread recipe, which is right there on the same page as the pumpkin bread recipe! This is my standard go-to quickbread recipe, I've used it to make blueberry bread and cranberry-orange bread in the past. This time I subbed 1/3 of the flour for cocoa, and of course skipped the nuts - worked like a charm!

The tricky part was that the nut bread recipe is for one loaf, while the pumpkin bread recipe is for two - and I only wanted a half a loaf each, so I had to halve one recipe and quarter the other at the same time. You better bet I was triple-checking each ingredient before it went into one of the four bowls involved! Luckily. It all went as planned, and the batters were perfect for swirling in the loaf pan. The result was a moist and delicious holiday snack!

Delicious!

Water Mousse

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 01:47:00 +0000

My newborn son seems to have a dairy protein intolerance, which means that I have to cut all dairy out of my diet until he grows out of it! This is a scary prospect for someone who is a strict proponent of real butter, never shortening, in my baking (not to mention a huge cheese fan), but it's also an opportunity to experiment.

Our go-to mousse recipe has been Albert's Mousse, from (what else?) Alice Medrich's Bittersweet. (If you are new to this blog, this is my chocolate bible.) Now, Albert is the author's dairy-intolerant brother, so already this mousse is done in the classic French style of nothing but dark chocolate, sugar, eggs, and water, so it would be fine (and trust me, it is more than fine).

But a few months ago, I was led to this recipe using nothing but chocolate and water. We definitely wanted to try this!

It's as easy as it sounds - boil water, melt chocolate, whip. We used Valor mint-flavored 70% bars that we bought at Whole Foods. Note that there is no added sugar in this recipe, so whatever chocolate you use is what you get!

Unfortunately, I overwhipped it (using an electric beater because we don't have a whisk right now). My advice to avoid this: At first, it will seem like nothing is happening, so, like me, you'll probably turn your beater up to high. That's fine, but as soon as it does start to thicken turn it back down to med or low. Then, the instant that it looks like "thick whipped cream," stop! I kept going maybe another 20 seconds, and while it tastes lovely, the texture was not at all mousse-like. It crumbles like wet, clay-y dirt, but was smooth and soft in your mouth. Definitely not unpleasant, but not mousse.

You can see, this texture is not as pictured on the recipe page:

The end result was tasty enough, though, that I think this solves a problem for me. I've been wondering what could possibly be a dairy-free substitute for ganache, particularly in truffles. Taste and texture wise, I think this would be excellent! The only question is how to assemble them - I don't think that this form would pipe well, and I think it would be too delicate too roll into balls. And unlike ganache, I don't think you can pipe this while it's more liquid and let it set up - it depends on the whipping for stiffness. But I'm sure I can come up with something. And the end result would be surprisingly delicious vegan truffles!

UPDATE: We tried it again, this time with a bar of 70% Ghirardelli. We stopped mixing much sooner, but to our surprise it kept firming up after we stopped! The difference was that we could get it into the pretty glasses while it was still shaped like mousse instead of having to scoop lumps into the glasses. :) This is good news, though, as it means that piping it into molds for truffles while it's still soft should work beautifully!

Cream Puffs: In Which Alice Medrich Continues Her Reign as Chocolate Goddess

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 20:12:00 +0000

As I've mentioned before, Alice Medrich's Bittersweet is my personal chocolate bible.

I recently bought another book of hers, Chocolate Holidays: Unforgettable Desserts for Every Season, which is the paperback form of A Year Spent in Chocolate. I'll save a full review for after I've tried a couple more recipes, but I will say that if "Chocolate cream puffs with spun sugar" is any indication, my faith in Ms Medrich is well-placed.

I've never made cream puffs or puff pastry of any sort before. The only time I've seen them attempted was when a friend in college, who was born in France, tried to make some from an original French cookbook and failed miserably. I hope she's since found a recipe as easy and detailed as this one! As usual, the dense recipe text leaves nothing to chance, and my puffs puffed up in lovely fashion.

The chocolate custard filling was exactly what I expect from a Medrich recipe. It did an amazing job of highlighting the flavor of the chocolate I used (my standby Ghirardelli 60% chips) rather than overwhelming it in egg flavor. It was also surprisingly rich for having no cream or butter in the recipe - in fact, I used a mix of skim and 2% milk rather than whole! I think you could easily make it with all-skim and be perfectly happy with the results.

Happily, my camera is working again (it's been broken since Christmas, hence the lack of photos in recent entries). Here is a shot of the filled puffs, with custard oozing out of their little holes:

I was making these to bring to school to pass out, so I skipped the caramel glaze and spun sugar meant to turn the puffs into a croquembouche and dipped the tops in a simple ganache. Although made with the same chocolate, the ganache and the custard had distinctly different flavors, which was a nice contrast. Here are the final, dipped puffs:

Overall, these were a huge success! And if you thought people were impressed by homemade cheesecake (which they always are), wait til you hand them a cream puff!

Chicago Luxury Ice Cream Festival Roundup

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 05:02:00 +0000

Tonight we went to the Chicago Luxury Ice Cream Festival. For $25/person, you could indulge in all-you-can-eat taster sizes of a dozen different gourmet ice cream brands, plus a small amount of alcohol and pizza. A few of the highlights:

The Winners:

- When I read that Vosges would be there, I assumed they'd be giving out chocolate samples. I did not realize that they are making ice cream now! Their chocolate chili was one of the top flavors of the event, hands-down. We went back for MANY refills! They also had coconut curry (called "Naga" on their site). I'm not a big coconut fan, so I wasn't terribly impressed with that one.

- Sassy Cow Creamery had two winners with Ginger Pear and Cherry Dark Chocolate - but the cherry ranked in my top five overall. Whatever dark chocolate they used in it was terrific.

- Ciao Bella Gelato had a Valrhona chocolate ice cream that may have been the only one to top Vosges. Dark and very creamy, my one regret of the night was that I didn't get a second cup. I also had their mango sorbet, which was tasty.

- I am a sucker for cinnamon ice cream, and Homers' had the excellent idea to add white chocolate chips to it. They were clearly creamy real white chocolate, and they went amazingly well with the cinnamon.

- Oberweis Dairy may have been the least "gourmet" (or at least, most mainstream) entry, but their mango-pomegranate sorbet and chocolate peanut butter ice cream were still at the top of the charts. They also apparently had a blue-and-white birthday cake ice cream that was excellent (according to the girl ahead of us in one line), but we didn't get to try that one.

- Unfortunately, neither of us remembers the name of the creamery who featured chocolate ice cream with sour cream and sea salt, but it was very good! The sour cream gave it a bit of a tang, and chocolate/salt is always a good combo.

The Mixed Bags:

- Nice Cream had an odd setup. Rather than a table where you could grab a cup on your way past, they had two tables at which they sat four people at a time, where one of their staff served everyone four flavors individually. This resulted in a long line (we waited over 20 minutes, and it was the only one we waited in for more than about two), and most people in line were confused about exactly what the line was for. The event's website promised a tasting contest where you could vote for your favorites, and people thought that this was the line to participate in that. But no, it was just another company. Anyhow, their four-flavor lineup had two winners and two losers. The peaches & cream, made with sour cream, was excellent. As with the other sour cream entry, it really added to the flavor (and I don't like sour cream by itself). The chocolate and sweet basil was the other winner - it's easy to forget that basil is in the mint family until you taste it with the chocolate! I don't think I could eat a large bowl of it, but a small amount was surprisingly good. The blueberry pie ice cream was good (and had a surprisingly "pie"-y flavor), but didn't stand up to the intense festival competition, while the strawberry and angel food cake was rather bland.

- Clandestino was clearly positioning itself as the gourmeter-than-thou entry. First was its chocolate chili, which won third place last year - but Vosges' much creamier version outshone it this year. Then was the one ice cream I tasted all night that was just bad - blueberry huitlacoche. What is huitlacoche? I wish I'd asked before I tried it, and I might have been prepared - it's a fungus that grows on corn. And yes, the ice cream tasted... fungusy. Mildewy, almost. *shudder* Luckily, they made up for that with their serrano cornbread ice cream, which was savory rather than sweet and was really very good! Cornbread is a nice sweetish savory taste well-suited to ice cream, and there was just a hint of serrano heat running through it. Wish I'd had a second cup before they ran out!

Worth a quick mention as well were the banana chocolate chip from Mitchell's and the very rich and flavorful vanilla from Shawn Michelle.

Dinner was taken care of by small slices of spinach stuffed pizza from Edwardo's, there was a table with taster cups of wine, and a table at the center of the upstairs room was handing out cups of champagne with peach ice cream in them, which Robbie says were excellent. They certainly had one of the longest lines in the place going! They did have a table pouring cups of water for those needing a non-alcoholic drink to cut through all the dairy. We also got a chance to walk around the nature museum it was held in, which was a nice bonus.

I recommend getting there early - we got there about 6:35 (doors opened at 7), and there was already a long line to get in. But once we were through the doors, we started upstairs where it was less crowded and were rewarded with almost no lines for the first half hour or so. By 8pm, it was getting pretty full.

Overall, they still have a few logistical kinks to work out (we paid at the door, but as we were headed in realized it would have been absurdly easy to sneak in because of the way they had it set up), but we had a lot of fun and ended the night plenty full!

Moser Roth 70%

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 04:23:00 +0000

We were surprised to find nice chocolate at discount grocer Aldi, of all places. They actually have two "store brands" - Moser Roth and Choceur. Moser Roth is definitely the better of the two, and is made in Germany.

The 70% has a lot going for it, though not everyone will like it. The flavors are very subtle, none of the obvious fruitiness that a lot of better dark chocolates have. Because of that, some people will probably find it bland. I quite liked it, though - it's not as bitter as many 70%s while also not being sweeter than you'd expect, and the predominant flavor seems to be pure cocoa. It's nice and crisp, a lovely texture.

After just eating it, we also tried baking with it. We tried making a flourless chocolate cake using this recipe, and the massive amounts of butter and egg just totally overpowered the subtle flavor of the chocolate. The recipe needs something bolder and a bit lower-percentage, while the chocolate needs to be used only in recipes that really let it shine rather than burying it. Perhaps in Alice Medrich's "Albert's Mousse" from Bittersweet.

Overall, at $1.30 for a 4.4-oz bar, this is a great deal for good 70% chocolate. It's clearly not as good as bars that cost 4 times that, but it's at least as good as many that cost twice that. There is also an 85% available, milk chocolate with toffee, and a few other varieties.

Caramel egg battle: Cadbury vs Walgreens

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 23:51:00 +0000

My husband's favorite Easter treat is Cadbury caramel eggs. This year, we found that Walgreen's has also started selling a store brand version. Since neither of us are huge fans of Cadbury's overly-sweet milk chocolate to begin with, and the ingredients list looked reasonable (ie, real chocolate and in fact less sugar in the chocolate than Cadbury's), we decided to buy a couple and do a taste test.

We both tried both eggs blindly, and could both easily identify which was which. The chocolate in the Walgreen's egg was not as creamy/milky as Cadbury's (it's a tiny bit grainy in comparison), but also not as sweet. It tasted a lot like Hershey's Special Dark to me - trying to be dark chocolate, but still quite sweet. Visually it was also darker. If we were just eating plain chocolate, the Walgreen's would win, although it still wasn't the greatest stuff out there.

However, at least half the point of a caramel egg is the caramel. The caramel in both tasted about the same - BUT the Cadbury's egg had a lot more of it. The Cadbury egg had a shell that was uniformly about 1/4" thick all over the egg. The Walgreen's egg was about the same size, but the shell was very thick on the top and bottom of the egg, leaving only about a 1" sphere in the middle to fill with caramel. It's possible they were going for something that mimicks a real hard-boiled egg, with the caramel being the size of the "yolk." But unfortunately, this led to simply not having enough caramel. The amount of the caramel in the Cadbury egg makes the chocolate hard to taste in the first place, and when you're dealing with chocolate that's kinda mediocre to begin with, that's a good thing.

Overall, we both preferred the Cadbury caramel egg. While the chocolate in the Walgreen's egg was a bit better, it wasn't good enough to make up for the lack of caramel. The masses of ooey-gooey caramel easily hid the drawbacks of the Cadbury chocolate.

I'd post pictures, but unfortunately my camera is still broken. :(

Hotel Chocolat - 40% milk

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:40:00 +0000

I discovered Hotel Chocolat during my annual trip to Boston in January. I was hanging out on Newbury Street and wandered into their store, where all the Christmas chocolates were half off! Score!

HC is a British chocolatier who owns their own chocolate plantation in St Lucia. They are committed to ethical farming practices both on their own estate and when dealing with the local cocoa-growing community.

They also claim to use minimal sugar to keep the cocoa front and center in flavor. I was very interested to try this, since I tend to find most British chocolate (such as Cadbury) to be way too sweet. So I was pretty excited when the variety pack I bought included a few pieces of 40% milk chocolate (they also sell 50% and even 60% milk chocolates).

I definitely liked it better than most milk chocolate. It was noticeably less sweet than the average milk, which was a big improvement. Crisper, as well - so much milk chocolate is slightly mushy. The one complaint I had was that it seemed overly creamy. If it were too sweet, I'd call it cloying, and I don't know what the equivalent of "cloying" is for creaminess. But it bordered on cloyingly creamy, whatever the real word is. But I think it's definitely the best milk chocolate I've ever tasted. Even Crimson, who normally hates milk chocolate for its sweetness, thought it was acceptable.

I've tried a few other selections - some hazelnut truffles, and a lovely caramel-flavored 33% milk chocolate. The caramel flavor really offset the creaminess nicely! I can't wait to get my hands on some 60% milk chocolate sometime.

Cheap white chocolate

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:43:00 +0000

No creations to share, but I'm just excited about this. In two different Cincinnati Kroger stores, we discovered Kroger White Chocolate Chips - which are real white chocolate! If you've never tried to buy white chocolate, it's a lot harder than you'd imagine. Many supermarkets only sell Nestle "White Baking Chips," which have hydrogenated oil instead of cocoa butter - less healthy and WAY less tasty. I accidentally bought them once to make peppermint bark, and it turned out downright disgusting. That was several years ago, and since then I have never, ever failed to check the ingredients list when looking for white chocolate.

Strangely, it seems to be the store/generic brands that are most likely to have real white chocolate chips. President's Choice has them, which used to be sold at the Jewel Oscos near me, but they stopped carrying them. Whole Foods' 365 generic has white chocolate chunks, which is what I've been using. (Whole Foods also carries Callebaut bulk white chocolate, which is good, but when we're making a LOT of candy for Christmas price is a concern.)

The Kroger ones are less than $3/bag, whereas WF 365 is $4.50/bag - that little difference adds up when you're making a lot. For some reason, no other Kroger I've been to, or other stores that carry the Kroger brand, has carried the white chocolate chips. So I'm excited to give them a try and see if they're worth using!

Chocolate Sudoku

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 05:23:00 +0000

It turned out a bit streaky - not sure why, the truffles we dipped that night didn't. Might be because we'd first started to spread out the leftover chocolate on a sheet of wax paper to set for later use before we realized that what we really should be doing is trying out our new mold.

It's filled with graham crackers! My pics of the center didn't come out, though.

Guittard Couverture Part 3: Marginal Success!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 04:39:00 +0000

We made one more attempt at tempering the Guittard tonight. It was a cooler night and the stove/oven hadn't been used in a few hours, so the kitchen was even cooler. Success! We dipped some ganache lumps we'd had in the fridge for a couple days, and they set up very quickly!

One thing I've learned: I'm not a fan of putting ganache in the fridge to set up quickly, which we did when our original experiments with this chocolate were failing. It just isn't as stable as ganache that has set up at room temperature over a few hours - as soon as you get it out of the fridge, it starts melting. So that the truffles we dipped tonight wound up having very mushy centers. :(

As for the chocolate itself: It's got a very fruity flavor, but for supposedly having more cocoa butter than average it's not terribly creamy. At about 90 degrees it is very fluid and easy to dip in, which is a plus. However, we both agreed that we actually like the flavor of the Ghirardelli 60% chips better, and the slightly lower viscosity of this just isn't enough to justify paying over 3x the price for general use. Maybe for something extra-special - it does make a nice thin shell for the truffles.

Bonus: We used the leftover melted chocolate in the sudoku mold! I will post pics this weekend.

Guittard Part 2: Continued failure

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 20:06:00 +0000

Well, I think that it is officially too hot and/or humid in our house to temper chocolate. Our second evening of attempted tempering was a massive failure. We finally topped off the molded truffles and put them in the fridge to set up, and are waiting for better conditions before trying dipped truffles so that we don't waste too much expensive chocolate. Which means either cooler weather or the AC getting fixed!

I brought the refrigerated truffles to a meeting today, though, and they went over quite well. The ganache is really soft, though - I think that setting it quickly in the fridge just doesn't leave it as stable as letting it set up at room temperature overnight does. When we do that, we have nice firm centers. Now they're very mushy when not right out of the fridge. I like my truffles firm, like Harry & David's.

Not going to bother with the pics, I don't think - save that for when something actually works!

Guittard 72% Couverture Wafers - Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 03:43:00 +0000

We made it down to CakeWalk Chicago - wow! What a great little store! Too bad they're 45 min away; we only made it there on our way to Cincinnati. But we scored some Guittard couverture chocolate as well as a couple of new molds - they have a TON of molds. We'll be coming up with something creative to do with this Sudoku mold for the puzzle competition we go to every January...

Anyhow, I've been hoping to get my hands on some real couverture chocolate at a decent price. Couverture has a higher percentage cocoa butter, which makes it thinner and ideal for dipping. Since our recent attempts have been plagued by a goopiness that makes it hard to dip anything, I thought this would be great. Guittard is considered the "low end" for couverture, and it was still $13.50 for a one-pound box. If I find something I like, I'll be able to buy online in bulk for less per pound, but I don't want to shell out $50+ for 5 lbs unless I know I'll use it!

We started out with some molded truffles tonight, and ran into some problems. Basically, the chocolate just never really tempered properly. I have no idea what we did wrong, or if it's just too warm in here - the AC doesn't work, so the room temperature was in the high 70s. But I'm afraid these truffles will not be shiny and pretty the way that properly-tempered chocolate should be. We lined the molds, and piped in the ganache, then piped the rest of the ganache into lumps to be dipped tomorrow once they're set.

We'll see how this all works out - maybe tomorrow we can get the temper to work better. I will post pics of the results later this week, either way. So far, I'm disappointed and am still on the search for anything that can beat my old standby $4/lb Ghirardelli 60% chips (which we used for the ganache today, btw) in value for the money.

Callebaut Semisweet Chips

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:41:00 +0000

We were out of town visiting family all last week, and while we were there we tried dipping some homemade vanilla marshmallows in Callebaut semisweet chips, which were on sale for $4/lb at Whole Foods.

They were less goopy while dipping than the Callebaut 70%, and creamier-tasting than average semisweet chips. But overall, I don't think they were better than the Ghirardelli 60% chips. I like the darker chips better, and both sets melt about the same. We did mess up the tempering on these ones, so it's possible they would have been harder to work with if they'd cooled more for a proper temper.

We often wait too long before declaring the chocolate tempered enough to dip - which means that sooner than we'd like, it's cooling to a point where it's hard to dip, and we have to rewarm it. And about 1/3 of the time, when we rewarm it we lose the temper. This time, we overcompensated and started dipping too soon, so it just wasn't tempered well enough yet. It eventually solidified at room temperature, but not to the nice crisp shininess that properly-tempered chocolate should give.

Free Chocolate

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 04:11:00 +0000

It's not exactly Valrhona, but Mars (makers of M&Ms, Snickers, Milky Way, Twix, etc) is giving away 250,000 coupons for free candy bars every Friday through September. It will take up to six weeks to get your coupon, and only four total per household over the entire period of the giveaway are allowed.

What's really interesting is that they seem to be specifically doing this to promote the fact that their candy is made with actual cocoa butter chocolate, rather than the "chocolatey" substances some companies use. Now, I would not call Mars a source of high-quality chocolate, but I do love M&Ms and yes, the fact that they do use real chocolate certainly is a step up from some companies (Palmer, I'm looking at you with your icky Easter bunnies made of shortening). And IMO, any attempt to educate the public about this difference is laudable, especially considering the health differences between cocoa butter and hydrogenated oils - although they make no reference to the health angle. In fact, they don't really say why real chocolate is better, just that it's real, and you don't want fake. Eh, whatever.

Go get your free candy! On Friday. Well, sign up for it and get it six weeks later. What can I say, I'm just a sucker for anything free.

(Found over at the Candy Blog.)

Chai Marshmallows

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:24:00 +0000

Last night, I made chai marshmallows!

I used Alton Brown's recipe as the base, making a half recipe. Instead of ice cold water, I took some very strongly-steeped black tea, emptied out the tea bag and refilled it with a Tea Masala spice mix I bought at an Indian grocery store, and re-steeped it with the spices. (The spice mix has black pepper, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, and nutmeg, but I don't know the proportions. It's perfect, though!)

I also added a half a teaspoon of the Tea Masala plus a half teaspoon of cardamom (I just love cardamom!) with the vanilla, as well as a touch of cardamom in with the powdered sugar/cornstarch that goes on the outside.

Overall, they are very yummy... If maybe a bit spicier than intended. You can feel a bit of a spice burn in your throat after you eat one - next time maybe only a 1/4 tsp of each spice. But the chai flavor goes really well with the creamy, sweet marshmallow - a couple of weeks ago I made cinnamon (as in, Red Hots cinnamon) marshmallows, and while they were yummy, the flavor + texture combo threw you off a little. This is a much more natural combination!

I will definitely be making these in the future, with just slightly milder spices.

Book Review: Bittersweet

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 20:12:00 +0000

Bittersweet: Recipes and Tales from a Life in Chocolate by Alice Medrich. 2003, Artisan Books.

Alice Medrich is the Queen of American Chocolate, and this book showcases why. Where to begin on why you need this book? I guess I'll break it down into three reasons: The recipes, the stories, and the knowledge.

The Recipes
This won IACP Cookbook of the Year for 2003, with good reason. I have yet to try a recipe that didn't work beautifully and deliver the perfect chocolate punch. Medrich has specifically engineered each and every recipe in this book to put the flavor of the bittersweet chocolate at the center. Most are written to be made with chocolate in the 60% range, but also include alternate instructions to use semisweet (50-60%) or 70+%; some also include instructions for milk chocolate, and some cocoa-based recipes are included. The recipes run the chocolate gamut, from cakes/cookies/brownies to mousses, truffles, ice cream, and even a chapter on savory uses of chocolate.

If you'd like a sample before you buy, try the Best Cocoa Brownies, which have been posted at Epicurious. These are so good, I haven't even gotten around to trying the other brownie recipes! I mean, come on - any recipe with more cocoa than flour is sure to be epic.

The Stories
Bittersweet, as the subtitle indicates, isn't just a cookbook. It's also a memoir of Medrich's chocolate journey, from a year spent in France to opening her legendary chocolate shop Cocolat in Berkeley, CA, to sharing the chocolate experience with her children. The book is a joy to read even before you try any of the recipes - anyone interested in memoirs or food history should pick it up just for a good read!

The Knowledge
Just glancing at many of Medrich's recipes, you'll notice that the text is long and dense - no mere bulleted list of steps. She is careful to explain exactly why different techniques and ingredients are used in each recipe, and why one recipe differs from another. These explanations are sometimes worked into the recipes themselves, but there are also sections devoted entirely to them. Once I read her explanation of what tempering actually does to the chocolate and why it works, it became so much easier! Baking and candy-making are more science (or perhaps engineering) than art, and understanding the mechanisms by which the recipes work goes a long way to making sure you won't mess them up and will be able to create variations of your own that actually work. Consider this a recipe book, a memoir, and a textbook for a class on the science of chocolate.

The book does have one flaw that really bugs me, though - there is no useful table of contents! The main TOC lists only the section titles and the names of the individual memoir essays, it does not include recipes at all. Each section has its own recipe TOC, but there are no tabbed pages for these, making it very difficult to flip right to the TOC you want. The index becomes the only quick way to find anything. I highly recommend bookmarking your favorites.

Even if it can be hard to find what you're looking for, though, the content is 100% worth digging through. If you don't already have this in your kitchen library, grab it now.

Callebaut truffles

noreply@blogger.com (Plum) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 02:22:00 +0000

A recent project we've been working on is making truffles using a mold, rather than just dipping the centers in chocolate as we usually do. Last weekend was our first attempt, using ganache that had been cut into circles about 1/4 inch tall, and using various methods to surround these with chocolate in the mold - dipping then placing in the mold and filling it the rest of the way with chocolate; putting chocolate, then center, then chocolate in the mold. None were ideal, and the shell-to-center ratio was high.

So this weekend we decided to try a new method: Coat the mold in a thin layer of chocolate, let it set up, then pipe in soft, unset ganache. We use Ghirardelli 60% chips constantly; they're easily the best value in terms of quality per dollar that we've found ($3/11.5 oz at Target). This time we decided to try something better, just to see how it went, so we got some bulk 70% Callebaut from Whole Foods.

The verdict: Thumbs up on the new truffle-molding technique. Worked like a charm, the ganache set up nicely inside the truffles and the shell was thin and crispy. We still need to work on making the bottoms of the truffles smooth, but the rest is shiny and pretty!

Thumbs waggly, however, on the Callebaut. It is a better-tasting chocolate than the Ghirardelli, but not necessarily twice as good (it costs about twice as much, $8/lb). It was also harder to work with, which I wasn't expecting. It was very goopy at the low temperatures required for tempered chocolate. I'd read that chips are to be avoided because they're formulated not to melt well (as you want them to hold up when baking), but the Ghirardelli 60% chips definitely melted better than this bulk chocolate.

I noticed that WF has Callebaut semisweet chips on sale for $4/lb, so maybe we'll try those sometime soon.

Welcome

noreply@blogger.com (Plum) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 15:37:00 +0000

Crimson/Plum is a husband and wife team (I am the wife and Plum half, Crimson is not big on blogging) who adore eating and working with chocolate. We have enjoyed making chocolates for friends and family at Christmastime for several years, and we are turning this into a year-round hobby.

Here you will read of our chocolatey exploits - we are starting to play around with different brands, percentages, and techniques, and I will report on the results of our experimentation. You will also likely find reviews of chocolate brands, photographs of our creations, and tutorials if you would like to try making some of these tasty treats for yourself. Although chocolate-making is the main theme, we will also be making (and posting) about other confections (I am particularly fond of marshmallow and caramel) and probably a bit of baking will sneak in as well.

Eventually we plan to sell off some of the fruits of our labors (my coworkers are enjoying them so far, but I'm guessing they can only eat so many truffles a week before they start blaming me for their extra gym hours) - so keep an eye on crimsonplum.etsy.com! (Of course, I'll post anytime we have something up for sale.)