A second life for a blog

It has been quite a long time since I last posted to this site. About a year and a half ago when I last posted I had just started my first professional job as a baker and my new life took a lot of adjusting. The schedule, starting work at 4:30am, was the most difficult part, and left me with little inspiration for blogging.

After 18 months of breaking in, I have found my way back to the world of blogging and hope to share my personal adventures in the kitchen. Rarely a week passes by that I am not trying a new recipe out or tweaking an old one. Hope you enjoy it--and licking the screen is perfectly acceptable!

I Have a Job!

This past weekend I had a stage at Tartine Bakery and was offered a job!!! I am so excited as this is one of the best bakeries in the Bay Area! The owners, couple Elizabeth Prueitt and Chad Robertson, were recently nominated for James Beard Best Pastry Chef, and are very talented. I have to admit that Tartine makes the best Croque Monsieur I have every tried, the chocolate-coconut tart is amazing too!

I start full time in a week and a half doing the early morning shift--in by 4:30am!!! Check out their website for more details!

The Mixer Had a Baby

However that mama is old and her baby is huge!

I got the mixer of my dreams, the big 6-quart Kitchen Aid!!! (thank you Terry!) For the past 8+ years I have been using the still-well-functioning 1940's Kitchen Aid model passed down from my grandmother. I have now placed that one into retirement, not to say that she won't come back for a visit once in a while.

Sugar, sugar

This week began by cooking sugar and more sugar. In preparation for several show pieces over the next few weeks each person in class made two batches of sugar, different colors, to share with the entire class. This gives us a large variety of colors to choose from and the sugar only has to be made once rather than everyday.

These photos are of my first sugar showpiece. The base is cast sugar in a circular mold the silver/blue pieces are straw sugar, which is sugar that is pulled until it becomes stiff and then dried--used as the background for many pieces. The flowers are a simple hedge rose with leaves.

We also had to make several calla lilies for the first show piece exercise. The calla lilly and hedge rose are two basic flowers that we made for practice to get the feel for pulling sugar. The sugar is very hot and after one day my finger tips were very sensitive from being burnt by the sugar.

This is my second sugar showpiece. The opaque white pieces are pastlliage, a hard sugar that is like play-dough with a chalky texture due to the cornstarch and powdered sugar. Unlike all of the other sugar we use, this is not a cooked sugar and the only one that doesn't use granulated sugar.

Like the first show piece, the base is cast sugar and the tall pieces are straw sugar.

The new exercise in this show piece was making pulled roses from sugar. These are made much like gumpaste, marzipan or modeling chocolate roses that we learned in cakes class last fall (check back on those postings for photos).

The last sugar exercise this week was creating bows, much like the chocolate bows we made last week. I didn't have much luck in the exercise because the sugar colors were not the same consistency when I began pulling, also the color combination was not very attractive. I hope to be able to try this again with better success.

On Friday we reverted back to chocolate for the morning with a field trip to a local chocolate factory, Guittard. This factory is not normally open to the public, but because we are all perspective future clients they see it as a marketing tool--how lucky we are! This is the chocolate that we used in our candy making in the first few weeks of class. Guittard is a family owned business, which is rare anymore--it has been almost two years since Berkeley local Scharffen Berger was bought by Hersey's.

On the tour we saw how chocolate is made from beginning (bean from the tropics) to end (chip, block etc.). It was fascinating and much more complex than many of us realize. I thought that one of the more interesting parts of the process is even before it reaches the factory. In third world countries around the world (countries mainly Africa and South America) the pods containing the beans are cut from the trees, beans released and thrown on the jungle floor where they sit and ferment for several days before being retrieved. Funny to think that the chocolate we all love was once sitting on the floor of the jungle with everything else that lives there!

With the completion of this week, only one week remains!

Edible Art

I had so much fun making the marzipan characters we had to make for our marzipan modeling assignment. These character that I made were based off of those in the book Marzipan Animals by Fredy Eggenschwiler, which I like because it has some of the more modern designs and I would love to own, but is impossible to find in the US! There is so much potential for these characters, which could be sold individually, wrapped in plastic bags--they do taste really good, but I love marzipan! Even more likely, they would make wonderful decorations on a themed cake.


The above is an alligator and the following are photos of each character.

Walrus

Duck

Ram (you don't see rams too often! A strange selection, but I thought it was cute!)

Parrot

Whale

Frog with fly in it's mouth

Chocolate Enameling. This is done with coating chocolate piped in a parchment piping bag. An image is placed beneath a clear plastic sheet and the image is traced with dark coating chocolate and then the spaces are flooded with colored white coating chocolate--a lot like coloring in coloring books!

The ladies who wrote the book The Whimsical Bakehouse have mastered this technique. I have been inspired by the book for years and found it to be a good resource for ideas.

Chocolate box and chocolate cutouts. I was very happy with the results of my box, but not terribly fond of the results of the cutouts. This took two days to complete and was way more complicated than it looks!

The bottom and lid (which is removable) are dark chocolate and the sides of the box are dark chocolate with colored cocoa butter colors. The cutouts on top are a mixture of dark, milk and white chocolate. I had a lot of trouble with tempering all of these batches of chocolate, which is one reason it was so difficult. Also, cutting such small pieces from the chocolate and making them look crisp and clean was quite a challenge. I think this would have looked better had I had the time to outline the flowers and leaves in more detail like the worm and bee.

White chocolate box with truffles. This was an exercise in making bows from chocolate. I was very happy with the results of this project and it would make a beautiful gift. The truffles inside were made several weeks prior during our candy making classes.

This is a collage of photos of my classmates chocolate cutout-box projects. I especially loved the castle project!

So, another week has come to an end and two more weeks remain in my culinary school career. The final two weeks will be focused on sugar work. It will be a welcome change after the past 4 weeks of working with and being covered in chocolate!

Chocolate Chickens?

Yes, chickens made entirely of chocolate! This week our assignment was to make a chocolate show piece made entirely from chocolate, both cast chocolate pieces and modeling chocolate, which is chocolate with corn syrup added, which makes it pliable like play-dough. The chocolate modeling pieces are the feet, beaks, combs and flowers. The wings are piped chocolate and all of the other pieces are cast--the bodies are hollow spheres.

I had a great time making this piece and was very pleased with the results--being the first time and all! I liked how I was able to use my design background and creativity in making the piece. I had seen some ideas in books, but created the final design of each element and the overall composition on my own.

This is a collage of projects done by other students in the class. I loved how much creativity came out through these pieces. Starting in the top left corner, going clockwise, the pieces are: dragon, character from Nightmare before Christmas, giraffe, geisha, clown, chef, hobo and a bunny.

There are three more weeks to go and much more creativity to come as we will be working on projects with marzipan and sugar in the up coming weeks.

Willy Wonka's Dream

I am posting a week late on this stuff, this is what we did in our second week in Chocolates and Confections and the first few items are the final result of some "in-progress" photos I posted in my first blog on this class. As previously explained, this class operates individually and by projects. The first was a series of dipped chocolate candies where we learned about tempering chocolate, caramels, nougats and ganache. All of the candies were hand dipped, a technique that is a dying breed, which required a good amount of skill to produce good looking candies.

Chocolate caramel. The first photo shows and entire sheet of the caramels after being dipped. They are supposed to all be 1" square, but evident in the photo, I didn't quite hit that one on the nose. It was really difficult to cut all of the pieces and dip them evenly. The taste of the chocolate caramel was very rich and the texture a perfect balance between chewy and soft.

This was my favorite candy until I had another about 2 weeks later and it hadn't held up. The texture was grainy and the flavor wasn't there as it had been before. I imagine I did something incorrectly in making the caramel causing it to crystallize.



Honey-Almond Nougat. These were delicious! A chewy honey flavored nougat with sliced almonds covered in milk chocolate. I had to make the nougat twice to get the consistency right. The first time I over cooked it making it much too hard, which would have resulted in a candy people could loose teeth on!

Nougat Square Truffle. There was a photo of these last week when I had piped the ganache onto the chocolate disks. After that phase I placed three 1/2" squares of very thin nougat onto the top of the ganache and dipped the piece in dark chocolate. In my opinion this was an awkward chocolate in both appearance and to eat. I didn't think the flavors were exceptional either, although I have to admit here that I am not a huge fan of ganache filled chocolates. I think that there are so many more interesting fillings that can be used and although ganache is creamy and rich, always making a good chocolate, it is much too common for my liking!

Cocoa Vanilla Logs. I don't think this is the appropriate name for these considering they only have a smidge of vanilla extract and really are all chocolate. For these I piped lines of chocolate ganache and cut them into 1 1/4" pieces, dipped them in dark chocolate and immediately rolled them in powdered sugar. They are meant to have a bark-like texture on the outside to look like a log. I didn't even bother giving these a try since it was basically pure ganache.

Three brothers. This is a traditional European candy, a cluster of three caramelized hazelnuts placed on a chocolate disk and then dipped in chocolate. I used white chocolate to dip, which is nontraditional, but they turned out wonderful!

Caramelized Hazelnuts. These were the same caramelized nuts used in Three Brothers, above, however they were separated and coated with dark chocolate and then cocoa powder. A really good snack!

Additionally I made Rochers, slivered almonds with a tad of caramelized sugar and coated in dark chocolate. This is where the Americans came in and substituted peanuts and other ingredients and changed the name to "clusters." So, for us Americans, these basically are almond clusters!

I also made Milk Chocolate Bark. This was a mixture of all mistakes and leftovers folded with milk chocolate and poured onto a sheet pan to about 1/2" thickness. Instead of dumping all of those over-cooked nougats into the trash, they made a delicious bark, and the more mistakes, the better your bark was! A win-win all around!!!

The following are the pieces that we were required to make for the second class project. Again this project concentrated on the same techniques as our first project, however we concentrated a bit more on cooked sugar in this project.

Cassis Fruit Jellies. Made in a similar way that jelly, as in "jelly for toast", is made. We used fruit purees and I used 100% cassis, although I wasn't happy with the resulting flavor. Luckily I was able to taste one of my classmates who combined strawberry accented with cassis. It was amazing how strong the cassis was and how in this combination it tasted more like cassis than strawberry, yet the strawberry lightened the flavor and eliminated the bitter taste that was in mine with 100% cassis.

Dark Chocolate Montelimar. I was so excited when our chef showed us how to make this and told us it was part of our second project. When I was in Rome for my semester abroad (now too many years ago than I prefer to remember) I was there during the Christmas season, which meant I was obligated to try all of the Italian goodies I had never seen before. My favorite was the Torrone, a cousin to the montelimar. Since then I have seen it seldom since, yet it lingered in my mind. I was surprised to find out that this chewy nougat treat is made with egg white. I made mine with pistachio and candied orange peel, which turned out to be a knock-out combination, especially when enrobed in dark chocolate! I can't wait to experiment with this more.

We also made either toffee or brittle, and I made pecan toffee coated in dark chocolate, however I didn't get a photo. It turned out a little on the chewy side and could have been cooked more, although the flavor was good.

The last item in this project was individual choice. This is the end of the line for chocolate candies, a very short week and a half. This made it especially difficult to choose one item out of the hundreds of ideas I has and different combinations I wanted to play with. In the end I ended up squeezing in two, Peanut-Butter Truffle and Strawberry Marshmallows.

The Peanut-Butter Truffles were a milk chocolate shell filled with a peanut butter and milk chocolate ganache. The shell was a pre-made shell that I filled, sealed the fill hole and then dipped in milk chocolate to finish.

The Strawberry Marshmallows used strawberry puree and turned out perfectly! I was surprised how easy they are to make--this being my first foray into the homemade marshmallow world--but very messy! This recipe made a huge amount and because no one can eat marshmallows more than every few months, I had a lot left over. The obvious solution--Rice Krispie treats! Yummy strawberry flavored Rice Krispie treats--I think I am on to something here!

Recchiuti Chocolates

Recchiuti chocolates was an easy choice for my first visit to a Chocolatier--it is in the Ferry Building where I work, and although this was not my first visit this time I visited looking at the chocolates much differently. I was looking at the percent of dark versus light and white pieces offered--they had almost entirely dark pieces in their collection. Most of the pieces were molded and most used transfer sheet images, I doubt that any of them were hand dipped, although I didn't ask. Pricing was based on weight and all of the chocolates go for the same rate, about $50/lb and the fruit jellies for a little less. The most interesting thing I learned was that Recchiuti uses Guittard Chocolate to make their chocolates, the chocolate we use in class.


I purchased four chocolates and three fruit jellies (below) and they were packaged together in a small box with tissue and a sticker to seal the box.

Cherry, Passion fruit and Pear-Lime Fruit jellies. These were a very good consistency, soft with a little chew, but not rubbery at all. The passion fruit was wonderful and not too sweet or tart, as is a frequent problem with passion fruit in pastry. The cherry had a terrible flavor and the pear-lime was something new and really good, really a perfect balance of both flavors and nothing fake tasting.

Rose Caramel (in a white chocolate shell), Cardamom Nougat, Fleur de Sel Caramel, Sesame Nougat (clockwise from top). Out of all of these there is only one that I would buy again and in any quantity (that was one requirement for judging)--the fleur de sel caramel, although it was very small (less than 1" square). It was very pretty with the white swirls and, more importantly, the taste was a perfect balance of salty and sweet. Also, the caramel has a good consistency between chewy yet soft. One thing I hate about caramels is when the consistency is either too runny/soft or too chewy to enjoy!

The Rose Caramel was a liquid caramel with rose geranium essence. I didn't like the flavor of the rose geranium essence and found the liquid caramel to be much too runny. I really thought I would be biting into something with more bite--what a surprise when it went running down my chin!

The cardamom nougat would have been okay had it not been for the cocoa nibs on the top, which I not only didn't expect, but that were much too over powering in flavor to do any good in this combination.

The sesame nougat was a risk just based on the name. I wasn't sure what I would get, but really there was so little sesame nougat actually in the candy that I am not sure how they can get away calling it by that name? This piece was a boring milk/dark chocolate ganache, that sat on a disk of sesame nougat, which was so thin that if you didn't look after your first bite you wouldn't know it was there!

Overall, I like the presentation of the store and the candies, but at the price I don't think this chocolate is all that great. I won't be running back anytime soon.