It's a beautiful warm Sunday in mid-February, so what am I doing? Covering ali_wildgoose's kitchen in chocolate while bopping to Breton rap, of course.

(Note: I wrote this yesterday, but only finished up its enormity today. Hence the anachronism)

The last few weeks have been ridiculously busy. After Ali left Boston, I spent a week catching up on all the things that I skimped on while having a good time with her as a Boston resident. Except that the world, quite frustratingly, kept on going and so kept giving me more things to keep up with.

Last weekend I went to a conference on Tinderbox, a fascinating "personal information management" program. Which means that it's a blog-maker, an outliner, web site design tool, story-writing software, and personal database in one package. It's not the easiest tool to learn, since there's nothing out there like it, and so I went to the conference with my father. Much was learned.

And much networking was done, which is of course half the point of conferences like that. During lunch I met with a bunch of guys in their thirties who are working with Tinderbox in neat ways: one to organize his software development, one to keep track of legal cases and resources in his law firm, and one just learning it. At the end of the weekend a conversation with my seating neighbor led to a meeting with the software author about documentation and upcoming projects, and I'm going to be working on some projects to make the product more accessible. Education for software, if not exactly software in education.

ETA: I did a full write-up of the weekend over at textuality.org.

Last time I wrote about food, I included Bernard Castelain chocolate, which has proven wonderful for truffle-making, though it is so wonderful for eating that I have to buy it just before I cook or I nibble it below critical mass. It's good for eating because it's crispy and almost dry in texture, but is smoothly smoky and dark in taste.

Anyway, that's not what I'm using today. Today I'm experimenting with soft-center truffles, which I've never made. They're much harder to make because you can't simply ball up some ganache and roll it in cocoa powder or dip it as with firm-center truffles. Soft centers require tempering chocolate, pouring it into a mold, then pouring in the center and closing the package with another layer of tempered chocolate, thick enough to stand on its own. The results will almost certainly messy.

Ali got me some Valrhona "Le Noir Gastronomie" 61% cacao dark chocolate which will be the primary coating-chocolate. I picked up some Scharffen Berger Bittersweet 70% cacao chocolate a while back and will use that if need be.

Ah! But the other news on this front is that I have, at least, tried chocolate-coating before, with the tempering and all that. Back in mid-january at Ali's mother's place we tried doing chocolate coating with reasonable success. I'm still hampered by the lack of a double-boiler, as my various handheld workarounds invariably slip, get too hot, or require four hands to manage. What I really want is a tempering machine. But until I'm making six figures and living in a space I own, I'll have to make do. :P

So I went to The Bakery Store with Ali and jlh yesterday and restrained myself: I emerged with three small and practical molds for making truffle-type chocolates, some gloves for my hot hands, and a box of Boyajian flavors (almond, vanilla, peppermint, and anise). I'm excited, and except for the double-boiler, prepared. Hut.

So we're about halfway through this experiment. We're making three kinds of soft centers, all experimental because damn is it hard to find recipes online for soft centers for chocolates. I must be looking for the wrong thing, like I should be looking for "cremes" or something.

The first is the spice-y one: condensed milk base with maple syrup to thin it and "apple pie spice" (cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice) to give it flair. Ali forgot to mix the spice in first, so the spice is going to stay clumpy/speckley, but other than that it's cool. It tastes good, though I think that the milk taste is still a little strong. Next time, perhaps I'll try it with confectioners sugar. It's extremely liquid. The chocolates are probably going to be difficult structurally as a result.

The second is a soft chocolate ganache... with Kwai Feh lychee liquor. The stuff is hard to find in the US, and we brought ours back from Tokyo. It's really nice with chocolate because darker chocolate takes the edge off the sweetness of the liquor and leaves a nice fruity taste. I threw in enough alcohol to make the ganache essentially liquid at room temperature and it also had that alcoholic cordial taste. Mmmm. I should probably apologize in advance: this was a bottle that we got primarily for bhanesidhe, but Ali hasn't been able to have her over for drinking yet.

The third is a mint creme center. I found it on the "Confection Canada" site:

Combine 2 cups powdered sugar, 1/2 cup (1 stick) softened butter or margarine and 2 tablespoons green creme de menthe (OR 1 tablespoon water plus 1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon mint extract and 3 drops green food color may be substituted for creme de menthe) in medium bowl; beat until smooth.

In this case that means 1 cup powdered sugar, a half stick of butter, 1/2 tbsp water and 1/2 tsp mint extract. We first threw the water and extract into the powdered sugar: mistake. Ali melted the butter and we mixed the clumps into that, then mixed in the rest of the sugar and that worked really well. The resulting mint creme was delectable and not so dry as I thought it would be.



The chocolates came out well, on the whole. The temper was a bit off, but considering that I didn't have a thermometer, they were pretty good. One thing I learned is that properly tempered chocolate is down around body temperature, and pretty thick. I've been pouring it too hot, which made the sides of the chocolate shells thin as the chocolate flowed into the 'tops' of the shells.

The spiced milk centers were a bit difficult. The shells were thin enough that trying to push the chocolates out of the mold cracked a few around the base until we'd frozen them first. The mint centers came out perfectly, and I'm going to have to try that again. The lychee ganache was also a success, though getting the centers in the right place will take some practice and some better tempering.



I've gotten to try out a few more brands since I posted about the Castelain.

First, there's Meiji Black chocolate, from Japan. Japan is not like China in that Japan has chocolate that is worth eating. Meiji Black is very sweet and slightly floral, almost a milk chocolate that is trying to be a dark chocolate. For some reason eating it reminds me of skiing and of ski lodges. When I was little and my parents were taking me skiing, we'd usually have a chocolate bar along for a snack on the mountain, and if we were good we might get hot chocolate for lunch. The Meiji Black reminds me of the smell of the ski lodges and lunches there. I don't think that I'll cook with it as it's really more of a milk chocolate in its taste... though perhaps it would be an interesting in-between to try.

Then there's Ghana Black Chocolate, also from Japan. The Ghana is very smooth and semi-sweet, a little smoky, and in the small package that I got it in, clearly for eating rather than baking. It could be very good for making hot chocolate and small recipes, as the taste is creamy but dark, rather like I prefer a hot chocolate to be. I don't know whether that would translate into actual hot chocolate once you'd liquefied and mixed it, but it might be worth trying. Like the Meiji, it's a bit floral, but the Ghana has a more polished taste. It's wearing a suit, while the Meiji is looking sharp in maybe more of an untucked button-down shirt hipster way.

The Scharffen Berger that I used ("bittersweet", 70%) in the recipe was new to me, as well. I had two first impressions of the Scharffen Berger: first, that it's clearly for baking. The inch-thick bar is barely scored for breaking. The second is that it smelled almost alcoholic at first. On opening the package, it has an earthy smell and a brandy or cognac scent, though mild. Putting the bar away after I'd broken off a piece I got that whiff of alcohol again. It's probably appropriate that we mixed it with the lychee liquor for the ganache. It's so different from the others. The earthiness reminds me of much, much darker chocolates like the crazy 90% stuff I got a while back, but that cognac takes the edge off.

And, once again, there's the Valrhona Le Noir Gastronomie 61% Cacao. Unfortunately, I was Bad while writing this. All the Valrhona went into the chocolate shells, and I didn't set any aside for writing this review. It was nice to work with, very creamy, though quite so much as the Burdicks, which I still seem to have had the most success in baking with. I'll try the Valrhona again, especially since it is much more widely available than Burdicks'.